


For A Tomorrow That Never Was

by JamJackEvo



Category: RWBY
Genre: Gen, Mystery, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-12
Updated: 2017-05-29
Packaged: 2018-09-17 01:10:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 54,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9297566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JamJackEvo/pseuds/JamJackEvo
Summary: When Yang and her team took on the Search and Destroy mission with Prof. Oobleck, she expected fighting some Grimm and even some White Fang bastards. What she didn't expect was somehow landing herself 12 years in the past and, barely a day there, lost her arm. With thoughts of home and her teammates, Yang will do her best to recover what she lost. But at what cost?





	1. Nostalgia

/ — — **CHAPTER 1** — — \

**Nostalgia**

**I**

**_Have you ever wondered how nostalgia isn't what it used to be?_ **

It was a quote she heard from somewhere, its origin lost in time. She had more than a few occasions in her short life where a sentence or a phrase suddenly pops into her head like some annoying, irrelevant textbox prompt in a video game, but they never had this "In Your Face" quality as this latest quote.

And how could it not when she was feeling as if she had uttered this quote herself—or at least wished she had.

Yang knew she had woken up somewhere in the middle of Patch, inside its many forested areas where you would likely get lost and never be seen again if you've gone off the beaten path. She was lucky to find such a path beneath her, but some bits of flattened dirt held no answers to the huge gap in her memory. She could've sworn she had been in the middle of a fight with that pink-haired midget—that crummy dwarf with that crummy smug and that crummy fighting style—but her opponent was nowhere in sight and it didn't seem like she was on a train anymore.

Standing up proved more difficult than she estimated. Exhaustion pulled at her to come back to the ground, lie down, and close her eyes, but doing so would open her up to Grimm attacks. Patch might be a small island where the local Huntsmen ensure that Grimm infestation was at an all-time low, but there would always be stories of people—stupid people—who'd wonder off and disappear, leaving behind torn clothes or even a shoe for searchers to find days afterward. She knew this island like the back of her hand, which should've proved useful to her current situation, however, the current fog enveloping the area hindered her sense of familiarity. To find her way back to civilization in this condition would be akin to searching for the candles and matches during a power out.

The thought didn't deter her. She had gone through worse, after all, such was the life of a Huntress-in-training. She checked her body for any injuries, scratches of any sort, and was glad that apart from having to ignore a few sore spots and bruises, which she had experience in droves already, she came out of her recent fight far better than she thought. Her gauntlets were still on her wrists, too, and a slight test proved they were able and combat ready. She fished out her Scroll and called Ruby, but all she got was nothing. No ringing whatsoever, not even a robotic female voice telling her that the number she was dialing was unavailable. Awhile later, she realized the signal bar was crossed and her frustrated attempts at getting any sort of call had the Scroll responding with **No Service** plastered on the little screen.

"Just my luck."

Though Patch was fully connected to the CCT on all corners, there were still black spots in places where the various towns and villages spread about the island were miles and miles away. It narrowed down where she probably was, but with how the situation had turned direr by the minute left her more uneasy than relieved.

Still, it was a start and she only needed to follow the path to get back to civilization. She pocketed her Scroll and picked a direction.

"Eenie meanie miney moe…"

Whichever direction would be fine because all roads in Patch led to civilization (if some lone houses occupied by old, eccentric but still combat-ready Huntsmen was also considered civilization), and while using this method with only two choices to be had was easily rigged with picking which one to start with, she indulged in the illusion of it being random. It helped her be sure of her decisions sometimes; she had no idea why.

She set off in a moderate pace. She knew she had to hurry. Another minute spent dawdling was another minute not knowing what sort of trouble Ruby and the others were in. Her body, however, would disagree to the thought. Her muscles ached, her eyelids felt a little heavy, and though as much as she wished to not think of it, she had to accept that she had been close to tripping back to the ground when she first stood up. Her Aura wasn't fairing any better. The extra exertion to save time hiking would certainly push her reserves to nearing empty, and with the threat of the Grimm looming beyond the fog around her, pacing herself was the better, safer idea. She couldn't be a lot of help with her team if she ended up as Beowolf chow before returning to Vale.

She kept her ears open as she walked, but all she picked up were the muffled footfalls of her own two feet on moist soil. The fog rampantly slithered into her clothes as she walked, and though it was cooling for her skin, she could do without having to wipe off the condensed vapor on her face.

 _Well_ , she thought, _I'm exerting myself to keep moving, and that is kind of a workout, I guess, so would this count as sweat?_

She wiped the spot above her mouth, and her fingers came back moist. She didn't even realize she was sporting what she liked to call a sweat-stache. She hated those; a simple lick of her lips (for remoistening purposes) would sometimes include a salty hint, courtesy of the sweat-based mustache.

 _I only ever sweat during a workout_ , she thought distantly before sighing through her nose.

She ventured through the fog, saw it fade for every ten steps, then five steps, two steps, and then she found herself free to look at the forest without an impeding filter. The trees had distanced themselves from the path ahead, making it wider than it really was, but the canopy above was just as thick as any fog she had seen in Patch. There was enough sunlight breaking through, but there were no "holes in the roof" sort of effect around her. Everything looked gray and dim. No red eyes lurk in the bushes and trees, and she was thankful for that.

Her trek continued. She checked her Scroll again for a signal, but the **No Service** prompt haunted her screen like malware. It must've been an hour since she woke up, and the fatigue had spread quite painfully to her knees and calves. Her throat burned, eager for a drink. Yang stopped in her tracks, took a deep breath, willed herself to ignore the hundred aches hitting at her legs, and kept on walking. The thought of resting tempted her, but she still could not catch a signal, which meant civilization was still miles and miles away, and the day wouldn't last forever. Being out in this forest, alone, tired, and low on Aura, was bad enough, she didn't want to worsen it by burning out what daylight she still had.

No, rest could come later, when she was back inside human-controlled territory. She would ask for any working phone if her Scroll still refused to reach the CCT and report her current position to Beacon. Then she'd eat, drink, rest, wait, and hope that her sister and their team had better luck than she did.

_Are they even still alive, though?_

She purged the thought. She refused to think more of it, but it was like blocking a leaking pipe with her bare hands. She thought of Ruby. Out of all the members in her team, she thought of Ruby the most, because her being back in Patch with no idea of how she got here or even what happened since the train—because surely that event had ended with either a stop or a crash—was gnawing at her as time ticked and tocked along. Was Ruby okay, where was she now, had she been abducted like her? Was this even considered abduction when Yang just found herself waking in the middle of a fog-infested forest on a dirt road in Patch?

And how could she really be sure that this was Patch at all?

There had been no way-signs since she walked this road. Not even forks on the road, just this path that made it quite easy to think she had been walking on a giant endless circle.

And why was she so certain that this was Patch, the place she grew up in?

For the second time, Yang stopped, took a breath, and cleared her mind. Then she looked around her, hoping to find some answers to her questions from the surrounding forestry, but none was forthcoming (as expected, really). The day was darkening already, and another check on her Scroll still plastered her with **No Service**. She was beginning to suspect her Scroll had been tampered with, but then why tamper with it at all when her abductors could've just confiscated it as they left her for dead? And on that note, why didn't they confiscate her weapons as well?

Instead of thinking on it more, she resumed walking, a little faster than before now. Plenty of time for brainstorming once more important matters—like her not dying in the woods or collapsing from exhaustion—were resolved.

Exhaustion, though, might have dulled Yang's senses a lot more than she first realized, because she only noticed the child when she was twenty feet away, standing in the middle of path in front of her, facing the same direction Yang did. Blonde hair like hers, braided into two short cute side ponytails, and pulling a bright red wagon along. Her shoulders were slumping—a sign of exhaustion that Yang could relate to—and the pull on the wagon, judging by the loud squeaks from its wheels, was done in an unbalanced rhythm, and Yang's mind instantly compared it to some wacky and noisy version of Red Light, Green Light.

Yang hurried her pace, intending to catch up with the little girl and ask her about… well, a lot of things, why she was here all alone, where was _here_ , where's your home, does your home have a phone she could use, but as the distance shortened to fifteen feet, ten feet, five feet, Yang's steps slowed then stilled.

A sense of déjà vu overwhelmed her.

The road had finally split in two—the right going straight, the left veering in that direction and uphill, ending at the front porch of an old raggedy house, whose windows were all shattered, roof caved in, and front door torn off from its hinges and left lying outside to the left of the dark looming passageway housing several awful glowing red eyes. The little girl whimpered, dropping the wagon's handle, and shifted backwards till she bumped into the wagon.

Yang chanced a look at the girl, intending to calm her and have her get behind her, but doing so had also given her a good look at the contents of the wagon: some food and water… and a sleeping little girl who had dark red hair and was wearing a red hood. But she was sleeping no more as the bump had been enough to pull her out of blissful dreamland and into nightmarish reality.

Inside Yang's mind, her voice was screaming. The déjà vu might've done its best to clue her in, but rationality would've also done its best to review the facts. As it was, the fact that a blonde girl with side ponytails, wearing a similar outfit Yang herself would've worn at that age, was out here alone and dragging along a wagon was insufficient to conclude a very farfetched theory. At least until she saw the wagon passenger and her eyes—silver eyes.

Just like Ruby. Just like Mom.

The Grimm inside the house hadn't stayed idle for long. Their growls were fierce, hungry, overlapping each other like a wind ensemble irreparably out of sync. It was hard to tell how many there were. Yang counted four pairs still within the darkness while three braver Beowolves leapt out of the glassless windows. One held little care with personal safety as it barreled through the porch railing, its momentum unaffected, and ran straight for the kids.

When Yang heard the children scream, action overcame thought. She got to the front of the wagon in two steps, flicked her wrists, felt the familiar grip of Ember Celica on her forearms, and pumped them with Dust shells.

Low on stamina, low on Aura. The only things going for her were the amount of Dust shells she still had and her natural fighting prowess. This wouldn't be the first time fortune had not favored her in a life-or-death fight.

And as the Grimm closed in and she pulled her fist behind her shoulder, she was determined that this wouldn't be her last either.

* * *

**II**

**_I will not die without fighting for a life I am not yet done living._ **

Fist met bone and there followed a sound of deafening thunder.

It was oddly therapeutic, if Yang were to be honest. Hours of trekking through the woods with nothing ever happening, forced to replay the last moments of her first mission as the rest of her mind did its best to focus on other things for a change. Despite the great disadvantage she faced, she was still facing it head-on.

"Stay down and stay quiet, kids!" she said, looking over her shoulder for a glimpse of the duo—and wouldn't you know it, the blonde girl had lilac eyes like her—and then charging straight into the pack congregating at the porch.

Beowolves were rarely alone, and though they were weak to all sorts of attack, they made up for it with speed and quantity. With Grimm being Grimm, lives meant little for their existence if the payoff was killing another Human or Faunus. Yang didn't expect them to be wary of her after disintegrating their foolhardy comrade with just one blow. In truth, she was hoping for the opposite.

First step, she needed to increase the gap between her and the kids. The Beowolf pack had to have their full attention on her and her alone. The second step involved something foolhardy of her own. She was low on Aura but full on bullets, and the Beowolves were masters of telegraphing their lunges that she need not look at all to know when one was about to pounce from behind her. A bullet to the face in the midst of their jump would solve that problem quickly. But that still meant she was going to let the Grimm surround her on all sides. They also were less likely to attack her one-by-one, so she'd be left open to more than a few other claws while declawing a chosen target.

It was a stupid plan, but it was what she got. Besides, there was still the third step—

A lunge coming from her right flank. Yang shifted her left leg to 8 o'clock, 6 o'clock, 4 o'clock of her right one's position, heel up, toes down, and spun counter-clockwise, right fist loaded and flying. The Beowolf was in mid-air, claws forward, mouth open and salivating, red eyes glowing with mindless but malicious intent. The first shot killed it in an instant, its head exploding into chunks behind it, but the momentum of its body still propelled its now headless corpse towards Yang. Sensing another lunge at her immediate left, she kicked the corpse to that direction. Momentum partially broken and trajectory completely diverted, the second Beowolf tumbled on the ground face-first. It skidded and rolled about, coming towards her, but she stood her ground. The Grimm came to a stop next to her feet, facing the canopy-covered sky, and still had the audacity to growl at her.

She sensed another Beowolf dashing towards her from behind. She ducked, left fist embedding into the mouth of the supine Grimm mid-growl. Her intention was to grit her teeth for what was coming next, but like the daredevil she was, the elation of battle had morphed that action to a shit-eating grin and she didn't bother to stop it. The shadows below her became more profound, as if the sun had been covered with thick clouds—the third Grimm was atop her. She depressed the trigger in her gauntlet and rode along its supercharged momentum. Her second kill also had its head blown off, scattering bits of soil everywhere, but she was already flying up, up, and landing a fast elbow onto the third Grimm's stomach.

She rode the flight to its peak, enjoying the out-of-breath whine stemming from her prey's mouth, and then pivoted her body so that she and the Grimm were face-to-face. Her left gauntlet was still smoking from the shot (more out of dissipating Grimm blood clinging to its gold sheen than muzzle smoke), its chamber still empty, but her right was the opposite, and she marked her third headshot for today as gravity and momentum hurled her back to the ground, into the anticipating teeth and claws of two new Beowolves that had exited the house.

She double-pumped Ember Celica and let loose, mentally counting each round. Neither Grimm tried to dodge; most of her shots were way off the mark to begin with, and that was fine because she didn't fire those shots to kill her prey but her velocity. Keeping her arms stiff during the recoil consumed bits of her Aura, and that was fine too. Better this than a claw to the face—anything was better than a claw to the face. Or the hair.

When her feet touched land, she calculated her remaining ammo inside the chambered belts and decided it was better to reload now than later. As she fished two fresh shell belts from her ammo pocket, the Beowolf on the left howled, followed by the right, and the rest of the pack residing within the abandoned home came out in droves like a disturbed bees' nest. She tried jogging her memory, the one of her childhood, and wondered if there ever was this many Beowolves at that time.

Distracted. Big mistake. The pack pounced on her together.

"Fuuuuck," she said through gritted teeth and a grimace before shooting the closest enemies without proper aiming. There was no time or room to reload, and she was lucky to have kept count of her remaining ammo. The pack had boxed her in, almost huddling together with her in the middle.

She managed to toss one belt upwards, but she had to drop the other when a Beowolf got lucky, scratching her left gauntlet. The shell entering and exiting its head gave Yang a higher level of satisfaction, but such a thing was short-lived with the hectic dodging, blocking, and attacking in-between she was forced into. The adrenaline had done its best to make her ignore the utter exhaustion her body had been battling against, but all things had their limits. No amount of adrenaline would solve her dulled senses, her slower reaction time, the ill-fated snap decisions she was making in her fight. Fatigue had caught up to her, and for every Grimm she managed to dispatch, five others caught her in their claws. Some tried for a bite, but she was constantly in motion, making most of the space she had and shifting towards the momentary gap she opened for each death of an enemy, which always got closed off before she could even get a foothold. They were tearing at her clothes, at her Aura-protected skin, at her hair, and she was pissed. Oh, she was fucking pissed, but she didn't lash out, not yet. Not yet.

She had to be sure every Beowolf was in attendance, all standing in one place for something she had been saving for a special occasion.

_Roll call complete. Everyone's here._

Now came the third step.

She trusted her Aura to act as her shield for whatever attacks that came her way, but she knew it couldn't be trusted forever. It would give at some point, with how low it was, so she opted for using one of her last-resort fighting styles. Absorb the blows, fill up her kinetic tank, and with the last of her fighting Aura, release it all in one devastating ground pound. The resulting shockwave would do the rest.

Her gauntlets were shot dry, and she could almost feel the searing heat emanating from the gun barrel even through the thick insulation.

_Just one more shot, baby. You can cool off, then._

She was grinning again. What a thrill this was, despite the danger.

Another Beowolf came towards her, and she released the spent casings on her right gauntlet towards its face. With the Grimm momentarily distracted, she swerved to its left, kicked its back, which brought it on all fours, and used it as a springboard to propel her up and out of the huddle. The Grimm occupied the space she left, howling and growling. The ammo belt she tossed was on its way down. Her timing couldn't be more perfect as she loaded her gauntlet without having to touch the belt and loaded a new Dust round into the chamber.

The energy saved up by her Semblance combined with the Aura she sent to her right arm, and as her jump reached its peak—a moment of stillness, a moment of weightlessness—she eyed the concentrated area of black mass and white bones just below her, a multitude of red eyes glaring with intense negative emotions. The grin was still on her face and her fist was ready for one hell of a punch.

Then she finally heard the children's screams.

There they were, in the same place as she left them, hugging each other next to the red wagon, faces plastered with fear as their shrieks continued flowing into her ears. A Beowolf, moving solo from the pack, had gotten close to them, one arm raised to the heavens, bone claws so much sharper and more terrifying than its brethren. Her heart felt like it stopped for one beat, then started pumping in a presto tempo.

"NOOO!"

Action again overcame thought. All the remaining power she had put in one Dust round was shot at a completely different target, but she only realized too late what she had done. The blonde kid saw the incoming projectile, bright and hot like the sun, and instinctively covered the younger girl with her body. Yang couldn't usher another scream, to at least tell them to run or use the wagon as a shield somehow. It was too late.

The shot, however, was wild, too far for a decisive hit. But it still contained a very volatile amount of power. When the Dust round hit the dirt, it exploded like a car bomb, pushing almost everyone back by powerful gusts of displaced air and a roar that felt like it was rattling inside your bones.

Gravity kickstarted the freefall, and Yang was ill-prepared for the landing. She had exhausted all her energy, bet everything on that final shot. She doubted she could muster the strength to show one final act of defiance towards the Grimm, shooting off how many fuckers before they got to her in the end. She, however, still put on the effort, but one more shot was far too much. The kickback was intense, and she felt like a kid again, just starting out with using her prototype weapon under the supervision of her father. She remembered the bruises and the broken bones that one time she pushed herself too far. And now she idly wondered, as she was a second or two away from hitting the ground, how many bones would she break this time.

She hit the ground with a squelch. She bit back the scream, despite experiencing the most painful thing she ever had in her life. A painful experience that only held its top spot for a mere three seconds before a flood of hungry Grimm descended upon her supine, defenseless form.

Yang screamed, then. She flailed her limbs about, kicking, punching, and shooting, never giving up, never giving purchase. But the Grimm didn't care. They smelled her fear, reveled in the pain she took for every move she made, as more and more of them mobbed her, slashing at her body. She screamed and resisted, refusing to let fear take over her, despite the part of her that wished for the suffering to end demanded she take the easy way out. Better a death by her own hands than a death this horrid.

She refused and successfully loaded another round into the gauntlet's chamber. She aimed for the Beowolf to her immediate right. She gritted her teeth, arm steady, but before the trigger could be pressed, the Beowolf grabbed hold of her arm in a vise grip. One attempt at pulling was all the creature allowed before sinking its fangs into her arm.

Her screams returned, so loud, so unbearable that she no longer cared if her voice broke.

Spurned by their brethren, the other Beowolves made use of their mouths, finding a spot to bite and digging in. One bit her shoulder. Then her left hand, but she got lucky there; it couldn't bite through Ember Celica.

Fresh tears muddled her vision, but she was partially thankful she didn't have to see the first biter tearing her arm apart. There was just so much blood, so much pain.

_So this is it, huh?_

She thought of the kids, so much like her, so much like Ruby, their situation mimicking so much of a time long past yet instead of a capable scythe-wielder who could decimate the Beowolf pack within a minute, what they got was a tired over-confident teen who got more than she bargained for. She wished they were okay, but then… how could they? If the explosion didn't kill them, then the Beowolves would. Some savior she turned out to be.

Then she thought of Ruby.

Her throat burned, a gift from thirst and the constant screaming. New tears came forth, this from a sense of finality. All the things she still wanted to do with her life, with her sister, with her friends, the burning question she still had been unable to find an answer to, they would all be cut short by the Grimm, like all hopes and dreams that had a run-in with them. She was going to die, and her loved ones wouldn't know, and she knew—just _knew_ —that Ruby would forever search for a woman that was no longer there.

 _I'm sorry_.

Her lips moved to say the words, but her voice was silent, too tired to even offer a token effort. The dead don't speak, that was probably why. The rest of herself just hadn't caught up to that fact yet. Maybe.

So then why, after accepting what was to come, she found herself defying it again as a hail of bullets and flying Grimm body parts entered her darkening vision? Why was she trying to smile as the silhouette figure wielding a giant scythe massacred the Grimm?

Dare she wish?

Dare she hope?

She whispered a name, too low, too quiet, drowned out by the mass roars of pain surrounding her. Her eyes tracked the lightning fast movements of her savior, barely able to keep up as the scythe—

She closed her eyes, no longer able to fight back the sleep she so desperately needed. This might be the last time she ever slept. But maybe… it would all be all right.

* * *

**III**

When Yang awoke, her eyes saw a white ceiling. Things were blurry at first, her memories, her surroundings, things were too bright, too faded, but she could never mistake the color of the ceiling. It was hard to move, hard to really think. She could discern some movement on her left, an indiscernible shadow behind what she believed to be white curtains. The background noise around her had mostly been ignored, but now she started to listen—rhythmic beeps coming from a machine. Her arm was bandaged up, with a see-through tube taped on her wrist and a blue clip gently biting on her middle finger like a playful puppy that hadn't started teething yet.

She thought of the word, _hospital_ , yet she couldn't come up with a reason for why. The bed was comfy as hospital beds go, but she still felt like shit and her right arm was a little itchy and she was still unable to move more than a few inches at a time. Pain, a feeling she felt held a great significance to her current situation, was now absent, replaced by peace and security, although such a thing had also spurned some confusion.

At least for the first ten seconds. Her eyesight had gradually gotten better—or rather reverted to normal—as the seconds ticked. And by the eleventh, the blob-like shadow had sharpened to a human-like figure, light was less of a pain to her retinas, and minute details in the room she missed once were now clearer and more vivid.

The figure behind the curtain must've noticed something odd, because it stopped what it was doing and seemed to be staring right at her through the cloth. Footsteps on a tiled floor came to her ears at the same moment the figure started moving again. The curtains swerved to the foot of the bed, and in came a black-haired nurse who looked quite surprise to see her.

"Oh," the nurse said, then peered closer at her as if Yang were a creature she had never seen before. When Yang blinked once, the nurse neared her bed and asked with a smile, "Miss, can you hear me?"

Yang tried to nod and partially succeeded.

The nurse had with her a tablet-sized Scroll with a white back cover, which she thought had gone out of style about five years ago. Ever since Scrolls were outfitted with a setting to customize the glass screen's transparency, the demand for such archaic privacy-givers had plummeted. The nurse tapped on it a few times and moved her attention to the monitor thing that read her vitals and stuff.

"The doctor will arrive here shortly, Miss," she said, still smiling, as if Yang's condition was too common to throw a little empathy on, but maybe that was true. Yang had no idea of hospital statistics, but she'd bet some Lien that most check-ins were either Grimm victims or Grimm survivors, and at times, these two things were not at all separate. "Is there anything you need? Does anywhere hurt?"

Her throat was killing her, for one thing. She mouthed water to the nurse, too parched for her voice to carry the request through, and the nurse understood right away.

After some minutes of almost one-sided small talk—Yang's replies mainly consist of nodding, head-shaking, and the occasional smile at the nurse's attempt at being funny (no puns were made yet, so she wasn't at all punny, badum tss)—the door to the room opened and in came a large man who had to duck his head a little so that the horns on his head wouldn't hit the top of the doorway. His horns were in the shape of a ram's, sweeping from the edge of his hairline to his nape and then curling inward. His hair, a lot more plentiful than she thought a man with horns would have, was as white as Weiss's and followed a similar style to his horns, gelled to shine and sweep back to his nape without a single hair strand out of place.

"Ah," he said as he neared the foot of the bed, his dark blue eyes glimpsing at his own tablet Scroll (with the same ancient back cover as the nurse's), but with how large his hand was, the device ended up looking more like a phablet Scroll. "Forgive my surprise, Miss. I've seen my share of Huntsmen exhausting their Auras to a crucially low level—life-threateningly low, even. But this is the first time I've seen one waking up after only three days in bed. The shortest on record before you was ten days."

Yang already heard this from the nurse—Nurse Fiona—who had prattled on about details of her rescue (but not the important bits, unfortunately), the state she was in when she arrived at Pall General Hospital, and how lucky she was to still be alive. Yang was unsure whether Nurse Fiona was actually this talkative or she was merely doing so to keep the dead silence as they waited for the doctor to a minimum. She wanted to ask about the two kids, but her few attempts at doing so hadn't gone well, either by getting cold feet or a slight coughing fit. She recalled her last image of the two kids. A Beowolf was about to claw at them, and on instinct, she launched a projectile—an _explosive_ projectile, for fuck's sake!—at them but the shot went wide and she hadn't heard any screams other than her own once she got reacquainted with the ground. Half of her wanted to know, but the other half would rather not.

Leaving that subject aside for another time, she turned her focus on the Faunus doctor in front of her. She knew him: Doctor Tushar. He had been the one to check her and Ruby over after the incident with the Beowolves in the abandoned house—just a few scrapes and bruises and probably some hidden psychological trauma, but when Uncle Qrow suggested he get the two girls checked over by a doctor, 5-year-old Yang jumped at the chance to delay the inevitable return to the Xiao Long abode and face the powerful wrath of Papa Taiyang. Dr. Tushar was also a good friend of Uncle Qrow's, as far as she knew, with a dash of mutual partnership that helped them climb up their respective careers despite their… well, problems. Qrow with his drinking habits and Dr. Tushar with his Faunus heritage because a higher-up in the hospital was a widely known bigot. She never did found out what exactly Qrow got out of the arrangement—if Tushar worked with Alcoholics Anonymous on the side, then he was a piss-poor representative, what with how much alcohol Qrow still manages to consume in a day—but she also knew when her uncle was being secretive about his contacts. Yang definitely never forgot this doctor.

So why was he acting like they never met?

 _But don't forget, he_ is _a doctor of Pall General. He must have more frequent patients coming through his door than a little girl who had_ one _mean brush with death but had grown up without needing another hospital visit. Anyone can forget someone they met only once or twice._

He started listing her injuries, some severe, some minor. She _did_ fracture a few bones, and with such a low healing output from her dried up Aura, they had to patch her up the hard way—at least until her Aura had enough respite to heal her naturally to full health, which Tushar estimated would take most likely two weeks at the least.

Great~

Yippee~

She couldn't wait~

Really, she couldn't wait. She wanted out of this bed right away.

"Doctor?" Fiona said, interrupting him from his speech. Yang didn't really care anymore. She might not have forgotten who Tushar was, but she had certainly forgotten how much of a theatrical talker he was, and she meant the bad kind of talker, someone who had plenty of energy in their voice but very little substance in their words, like a preacher of a doomsday cult. When Tushar stopped his speech to look at Fiona, she said, "She doesn't yet know about…" She motioned with her hand. Some sort of gesture, but Yang couldn't figure out the meaning of it.

Tushar, however, understood it right away, and his gaze moved from the nurse to Yang, observing her with far more scrutiny than what she deemed to be comfortable.

"I see." he said, and here his voice changed. Lower in pitch, his delivery a little solemn, a little hesitant, like a kid resigning to confess to his parents about a bad thing he did. Yang understood right away she wouldn't like what she'd hear, but it had to be done. "Miss, I'm afraid this will be a shock to you."

Fiona tapped and swiped some things on her Scroll, and then the bed's upper body started to rise, startling Yang a little. The heart rate monitor's beeping increased its pace gradually. She didn't need to listen to outside reading to know her heart was hammering quite hard in her chest. She knew it was just nerves, like stage fright or waiting for the pregnancy test results (not hers), but she couldn't help herself. Something about this rubbed her the wrong way, something out of place, something awful. The two other people in the room seemed to agree with her feelings, if not by words then by body language.

Tushar breathed in, then out, and he looked to be bracing himself for something. Another _really_ bad sign. "Please," he said, then gestured to something on the right side of her bed, "look down."

She did, and at first she didn't know what she was supposed to see. Her body was clad in a hospital gown, nothing out of the ordinary. Her arm was wrapped in bandages from the shoulder all the way to—

_No…_

She sucked on her breath. Blinked. Held her breath.

_No… no… no, no, no!_

The bandages were wrapped over her shoulders, her biceps, her elbows, and nothing else. Because from the elbow down, there was nothing. Absolutely nothing.

_Can't be. Impossible. It's there, my arm's there! Right there, right fucking there!_

She jerked her left arm to her right, disturbing the IV and the clip on her middle finger. She couldn't care less about those. There was still some sensation in her right arm. She felt it, absolutely _felt_ it, dammit! But as she tried to clench her right hand to a fist, the feeling had dwindled. Then numb. Disembodied. No matter how hard she clenched, the piercing sensation on her palm was absent. Her left hand went to grab her right forearm or where it should've been, but it was like grabbing onto a ghost.

_No no no nonononononononono—_

Someone grabbed her shoulders, pushed her down, and she resisted it, flailing her whole body about, not caring about anything. Something primal had awakened within her, a torrent of emotion that had no chains to keep it in check. The beeping was getting faster, faster, _faster_ , and the shouts were getting louder, _louder_ , and she wished that person would shut the fuck up. Her arm was gone. She's the one who should be shouting. Her fucking arm was gone!

Then she felt something worm inside her left arm. Not the IV, not that, something colder, something she didn't want, but whatever it had been was fast-acting as she felt not just the numbness in her (missing) right arm, but her left now as well. Was it gone as well? Was it going away and leaving her? Was she armless now? Was she—

The doctor was saying something as the bed slowly lowered her down, but she couldn't catch it. Her eyelids were heavy, she couldn't feel anything anymore, much less hear. But some small part of her that had scraped up a small ounce of coherence had one final thought to conjure before sleep completely took over.

_The person screaming was me._


	2. Visitation

/ — — **CHAPTER 2** — — \

**Visitation**

**I**

His Scroll vibrated in his pocket. He took it out and received the call without looking at the caller's identity. He didn't need to; Taiyang was tucking up the girls in bed and his current boss had already contacted him earlier today about an emergency job he'd been "volunteered" into, which meant an early rise in the morning (Joy…). No one else had his private number except for a few informants, and right now he only tasked one with a simple job.

The voice on the other end merely said, "Qrow, the woman woke up."

"Okay." He mulled the info over as he finished the half-empty glass of whiskey in his hand. Waking up after a dangerous case of Aura exhaustion just three days after the incident. He'd be lying if he said he wasn't impressed. "How is she?"

"Better than expected. In truth, she was only awake for about fifteen minutes before we had to sedate her."

"Trouble?"

"She reacted poorly to the loss of her arm."

The only sign of a wince on his face was the slight sinking of his right cheek as if he were sucking it towards the center of his tongue. He looked at the empty glass, tipped it a little to the side, and watched the two tiny ice cubes within skating to where gravity led them. The bottle next to him was opened but empty.

He let out a small sigh through his nose, set the glass on the counter he had been leaning on, and moved towards the living room windows.

"I hope that isn't the only reason why you called at this hour," he said, eyes on the curtained window that had a wide shot of the house's porch and the front lawn. It was night time now, but the time he looked through this window earlier, the orange tint of dusk made everything look like autumn had come early this year, saturating the area in a color he had a hard time looking at without being drunk first. He'd always hated fall. Bad things always happen during fall.

"No," Tushar said, sounding a little subdued, "it isn't, my friend. She had woken up at about ten in the morning. Fiona was the one to call it in. After sedating her, I still had paperwork to do, so I allowed Fiona to stay there and message me again when she wakes. At lunchtime, she was up, but silent. Fiona told me she never took her eyes off her stump."

"Uh huh."

He could understand that. When he came to the scene of the carnage, the girls were dazed and temporarily deaf from a nearby explosion, but other than a few scrapes and bruises, they were fine. The teen, however—the girls' savior, as Yang had immediately pointed out—looked half-dead after he took care of the Grimm infestation. Her right arm was badly mangled, and a quick check of her Aura level made it clear that there was no saving that arm. Her Aura would stop the bleeding, but that was as far as it would go.

She was young, but trained to be a Huntress. Her weapon of choice was a pair of gauntlets equipped with buckshot Dust shells. The design was simple, the end result was deadly, especially if the user was well-trained in martial arts. Yang had said she moved like her dear old dad. Losing that right arm would mean losing her fighting style as well.

"When I talked to her," Tushar said, "she called me by name, which I find to be quite an odd occurrence."

There was a certain tone in his voice that signaled a few alarm bells in his head.

_Oh dear Lord, here we go_ , Qrow thought. _The ass just loves hearing his own voice._

"Let me guess," Qrow said, "you never told her your name yet she knows it right away."

"… yes, though you could've at least—"

"Save the storytelling to someone who cares, Tushar. Just tell me what I asked you to do."

The Faunus sighed through the line. "Very well. Her knowing my name wasn't the only odd thing about her."

_Oh gee willickers, Tushie, I never would've guessed._

"She said she's a first-year student at Beacon Academy and was on a mission in Mountain Glenn before all this. She didn't elaborate the specifics of said mission."

"Classified information."

"Yes. A popular saying with you Huntsmen, I guess."

Qrow looked away from the window and settled down on the nearest couch. "Anything else she said?"

"She asked for the condition of the two girls, and I informed her that they were all right. She looked quite relieved about that."

He thought of the explosion and the Dust shells loaded in the gauntlets. A few pieces of the puzzle came into place.

"She also said she wanted to contact her superiors right away. Get debriefed, find out what happened to her team. Team RWBY, she said. And that's ruby with a W, not U."

"Did you ask her why she was there, at that abandoned house? If I'm following this right, she told you she was on a mission in Mountain Glenn."

"Yes, I did, and according to her, she doesn't remember."

_How convenient…_

"Said she was fighting a, and I quote, 'an annoying midget with an annoying grin and an equally annoying umbrella,' end quote. She got knocked out and when she came to, she found herself in the middle of the forest in Patch."

"You think she's telling the truth?"

"She looked uncomfortable telling me this part, because I think she suspected I wouldn't believe her."

Qrow _really_ wished he'd be more to the point. "And did you?"

"I told her what she wanted to hear." Which was his way of saying, 'I lied to her to make her feel better.'

He leaned back on the couch and was in the process of putting his feet up on the coffee table, but caught himself from doing so midway. Summer always hated it when he—

_Ah fuck. Fuck!_

He took a deep breath through his nose, closed his eyes. Then he put his feet on the ground. And here he thought he was over it.

"Hello, Qrow? You still there?"

One elbow on the couch arm, eyes still closed, hand on his face, then using said hand to comb through his hair and stop at his nape. "Yeah," he said, and he realized his voice was gruffer than usual. In a more normal tone, he continued, "Still here."

If Tushar noticed something, he didn't bring it up. "She was walking the trail until she ends up in civilization. She didn't expect at all to find your nieces there."

"I figured that was the case. Foolish of her to play the big damn hero, though."

"You make it sound like you _wanted_ your nieces to die."

His wince this time was a lot more profound, more noticeable. If it hadn't been for that mysterious Jane Doe showing up when she did, he would've returned to Tai to help with funeral processions than with taking care of the clearly traumatized girls. That fact, that he arrived late to save them, haunted him a little, so as was the case for every new thing that haunts him, he spent the last few days chasing the bottom of a glass. It didn't push the problems away, but it sure as hell made them more tolerable to deal with.

"That came out wrong," he amended. "I meant she should've been more careful."

"Isn't that a given when fighting Grimm?"

"Yeah, but some people are naturally cocky." It was a damn miracle Tai hadn't picked the short end of the stick with his asinine stunts through the years. He must be luck incarnate. "Well, did you happen to call her superiors, by the way? If she's telling the truth, then a simple inquiry at Beacon would be enough."

Tushar said nothing.

"Hello?" Feeling a little concerned, Qrow leaned forward on the couch, both forearms resting on his knees. "Hello, Tushar?"

"Still here," the Faunus said, though Qrow was quick to note the change in his voice. What was once so confident and theatrical was now subdued and unsure. Though a part of Qrow believed that he went silent because it added drama, probably thinking that if Qrow could do it, then he could as well. Him and his fucking theatrics. "There was just one more thing I hadn't mentioned. Hell, just _thinking_ about it confounds me."

"Should I brace myself?" he said, with equal parts seriousness and sarcasm.

Instead of continuing the tension-freeing banter, Tushar went right ahead with the sucker punch. "She said her name is Yang Xiao Long."

Qrow stayed silent—time had become very subjective now, so he didn't know how long exactly—and so did Tushar, deciding to allow dead air between them, a moment of total silence for the tired, drunken Huntsman to process that little bit of intel. He thought of the woman, her bright blonde hair, the formation of her face. Looking at it—hell, just _recalling_ it—feels like looking at a childhood photograph. A bit of nostalgia, a bit of pain, a bit of longing. But he disliked being reminded of that person, now more than ever.

"Bullshit."

"A _lot_ of this sounds like bullshit, Qrow, I know. I even went ahead and inquired Beacon if they had a student in their roster with the name Yang Xiao Long, and the closest match they were able to pull up was your team member, Taiyang. No one named Yang Xiao Long is currently enrolled in Beacon."

"Her team?"

"None had that team name. And I didn't think to ask for her teammates' names when I talked to her."

"So she's lying, then."

Tushar said nothing.

Qrow sighed. "Do you _think_ she's lying?"

"I know a liar when I see one, Qrow. It's what I'm good at, and my gut says she's telling the truth. Or at least she _believes_ herself to be who she says she is."

A headache was slowly forming. He tried to nurse it with a gentle massage, but it wasn't enough. What he wouldn't do to be drinking again and pretend Tushar had never called him tonight. "A girl who has the same name as my niece and claims to be a student of Beacon, which apparently has no records of her whatsoever."

"And that's about it, Qrow. What do you want to do now?"

"What _I_ wanna do? What are you asking me for?"

"I'm a doctor who does favors for his Huntsman friend from time to time. I'm not going to tell you what to do. I'm just asking what you _want_ to do now knowing what you know."

"Shit, I don't know." He only kept tabs on her because the circumstances of her being in the right place at the right time was suspicious. A Huntress-in-training, very low on Aura, just so happened to be taking a stroll—or at least in this case, heading back to civilization—and then be at the right moment to save his nieces from certain death? He was thankful, of course, so was Taiyang, but trust was another thing entirely. It didn't help matters that she looked somewhat like—

He shook his head. "Just… keep an eye on her," he said finally. "I wanna think about this a little more."

"Don't take too long now, Qrow. I can't hold her here forever."

The conversation was done. They said their goodbyes and Qrow ended the call. Whatever energy that kept him sitting upright for the most part had disappeared a second later, and the arm holding the scroll swung down to between his knees like a puppet arm with cut strings. His other arm stayed where it was, elbow on knee, while its hand tried to support his head and cover his whole face at the same time.

"First time I've seen you this slumped after only a half-bottle of whiskey."

On the stairs going down, Taiyang entered the room, a lopsided smirk on his face.

Qrow snorted. "Oh please. If anything, alcohol is my coffee. It sure beats the shit they call coffee over at Luntian."

"Should I know the details of that particular story?"

"Only if you tell me that time you've gone to Mistral and somehow lost your pants and all your money."

Tai, eyes wide, one eyebrow cocked, and lips smiling lopsidedly, crossed his arms and then leaned on the wall next to the bottom of the stairs. "I doubt that's what you would call an equivalent exchange."

He smiled, rolled his eyes. "There was this nice looking girl that had the shortest skirt I've seen there, too."

Smile turned to a full blown grin. "Oooooh, now we're talkin'. The girls are asleep so don't leave anything out."

"Let's save the stories for later, Tai. I need to let off some steam."

"The kids are asleep, remember? No call girls, please."

"Fuck you."

"I don't swing that way, either."

"Fuck. You."

"Language! There are children in this house."

"They're asleep like you said, asshole. Besides, I only need to talk this one out."

"Then go see a shrink. The last time I had to listen to your drunken tirades, Pixie-Mixie's bar got wrecked, we got banned, you got into a fistfight with a lamppost, and I never got to finish my beer." He said that, but he went back to the kitchen and inspected the empty whiskey bottle. "Well, at least you won't be drunk this time."

Qrow thought of the girls, that woman, her face, _her_ face, the shotgun gauntlets, the mangled arm, the confusing information… and then that strange Scroll on the kitchen counter, a Scroll he just so happened to pocket after helping stop the woman from bleeding to death before he could get her to a hospital. Was it the face, was it the peculiar circumstances, was it the vast amount of Grimm in the area, that made him do what was amount to stealing private property? He looked at his best friend, whose eyes still twinkled, like the innocence of his teens had never really died.

Tai held up the said Scroll and tilted his head. "Huh. I'm not familiar with this model. Looks slick as hell."

"It's the woman's Scroll."

"Who?"

"You know who."

Tai blinked. "You… _stole_ her Scroll." It was a sentence, not a yes-or-no question.

Sighing, he stood up from the couch. "You got any more whiskey, Tai? I think we're both gonna need it."

* * *

**II**

Taiyang _did_ have more whiskey. He just had to procure one from a secret stash, something he made because raising Ruby influenced him to be very cautious of where he stores his unsafe-for-children things, more so once the little red riding hood started to walk around the house. That Qrow had sometimes procured himself a bottle or two from it without Tai's permission would remain, like the stash, a secret.

Qrow joined Tai at the circular dining table in the middle of the kitchen, sitting himself next to him, as he, Tai, poured each of them a very generous amount of whiskey. They clinked their glasses and drank. Qrow downed his in one shot. Sighing contentedly, he filled his blond friend in on this strange case. A strange _unofficial_ case, which happens to involve a certain blonde woman who sacrificed an arm to ensure Tai's two children would still be alive. He told him everything, the familiarity, the name, the absurdity of it all. He went through three, maybe four or five, glasses already, while Tai was still sipping his second one.

"Well," Tai said by the end of it, looking at his half-finished glass, shrugging, and then chugging it. "That is one hell of a thing."

Qrow groaned a response. He was feeling the whiskey's effect, the warmth flowing through him as if he were relaxing next to a furnace during winter. His Aura started staving off the alcohol's effects, but with a little force of will, he could lessen that battle to a minimum. Sometimes it was a blessing—becoming sober in a few seconds helped in a fight—and sometimes it was a nuisance, like right now. No fucking way was he talking about this sober, not while he still had a hard time processing it.

"You got a picture of her, by any chance?" Tai asked.

Qrow looked at him.

"You always take a picture of someone you don't know but are suspicious of. Later cross-referencing, I guess. So you got one right now, right?"

He nodded and fished out his Scroll. He stopped his finger from pressing the Gallery icon, pondering. Tai still didn't know what the woman looked like—or rather _whom_ she looked like.

_Should I warn him?_

His sister's sudden departure hit Tai hard, though he never showed it. A Hunstman's job has with it a lot of risks and the death rate is one of the highest for jobs in Remnant, so it wasn't as if he was unprepared for such an occasion where he'd have to wake up with the other side of his bed cold and kempt every night from now on, but that was about death. For Raven, it was about _leaving_.

In truth, Qrow was unsure how his friend would react to seeing a lookalike of his old lover but with blonde hair.

_Hair just like his. Hair just like little Yang upstairs._

He pressed the Gallery icon, ignoring that stupid, crazy thought. But… maybe it was even stupider to go ahead with this without at least a warning. Except he needed someone else to verify for him, to know that he wasn't just trying to see something that wasn't there, and his warning would most likely color Tai's perception of the woman.

The woman's face appeared on the Scroll's little screen. It was taken after they got out of the forest, waiting for the ambulance to finally arrive. Normal procedures required that the injured party not be moved until paramedics arrived on the scene, but with their isolated location and the ever-looming possibility of another Grimm attack, getting out of there and entering the nearest town was the best option for survivability for all involved.

They must've looked pretty stupid to the townsfolk, him carrying two kids—the toddler in one arm, her head on his shoulder, sleeping; the blonde child piggybacking him, her chin pressing on his other shoulder, too shook up to even sleep—and the injured woman in the wagon, which was too small for her, so her heels drew a couple lines on the road between the deeper, more pronounce wheel marks the wagon drew. The woman had been bandaged up the best he could, using his old cape as both makeshift bandages and a tourniquet, but… well, he was glad the wagon was red, but it'd still need a thorough cleaning before the girls ever thought of using it again. In that wagon, bloodied but alive, the woman's face was anything but calm. Was it the pain or was it dreams? He was unsure.

Tried as he might to be objective, that face, somehow able to overlap with his sister's without trying, made him decide to snap a photo, rude as it was. Two small drops of blood still smeared the woman's right cheek and he had no doubt her skin was paler than what was normal for her. It was no formal photo, but it would do.

When Tai saw the photo, he went silent. His eyes narrowed and his lips became a thin line. He remained unmoving, staring intently at the photo, and only snapped out of it when the Scroll automatically turned off its display from prolonged idleness. The look on his face conveyed a man coming out of a hypnotism spell.

He blinked, looked around the kitchen, blinked, looked at the Scroll in his hand, whose grip on the device suddenly got tighter. Then those blue eyes turned towards Qrow. "She looks like Raven."

Qrow nodded, his eyes on his whiskey-less glass. He poured himself another drink, but the bottle ran empty after it reached halfway up the glass. Better than nothing, he supposed. "Yeah, I noticed."

"Her hair is blonde, though."

"Yeah, I noticed," he said again, with sarcasm upped to the next level.

Tai was silent for a while. Then: "I can see why she peaked your interest, but that doesn't explain why you thought to steal her Scroll."

Qrow drank till the last drop. "It's not stealing if I say I took it for safekeeping."

"I think it's still considered stealing if the affected party hasn't given you their consent."

"Details, details."

Tai pursed his lips, but decided to move the topic forward. There was no use crying over spilled milk. He took the woman's Scroll and observed it, like an expert inspecting the authenticity of a relic.

"I definitely have no clue about the model," Tai said, nearing his face to the rear camera. His eyes widened before his lips let out an amazed whistle. "20 megapixels. Real high-tech."

"You sure it ain't two-point-oh you're looking at?"

"No decimal point I can see, and besides, why would they put a zero on if it's just two megapixels?"

"Sleazy marketing strategy. Vacuo does it from time to time."

"Hmm. It's bigger than the usual Scrolls, too."

"It's about five and a half inches in height, two inches and some change across."

Tai gripped it like he would with his own Scroll, which he then took out of his pocket to compare them. He pressed them together, the knuckles of his middle finger butting each other like two rams fighting. "Bigger, longer, and—"

"Please don't make a dick joke."

Tai snorted. "Unlike you, I keep my language in check while the girls are here, asleep or no."

Qrow shrugged. "Could've fooled me."

Tai rolled his eyes and double-tapped the Scroll's screen. Through the gaps in his fingers, Qrow could see the yellow background of the lock screen and when Tai swiped his thumb from the center to the right, a new box popped up, and he frowned.

"Fingerprint protection?" he said.

" _Unbelievably_ high-tech, don't you think?"

"Well, I heard Atlas is developing such a feature for future Scrolls, but most of the feedback I hear is that it's inaccurate. Kind of weird to see it here, though."

"I doubt she's with the Atlesian military."

"Uh huh. Have you tried it?"

"Yeah." The ice in his glass had melted a little, gliding about on paper-thin level of water mixed with whiskey. He wondered if he was desperate enough for more alcohol to drink even a tiny amount of the watered-down stuff. A second later, he decided he was and drank it up. Whiskey was whiskey, and as this conversation of theirs closed in on the climax—with the various clues he had already dug up but refused to admit lest he gives himself further proof that 'crazy' is a trait he shares with his sister—he wished he could go to Tai's stash and gulp down a-whole-nother bottle of liquid fire. "No go. It's locked up tight. Even tried seeing if there's some intact fingerprints on the screen, but it's clean. And I mean _completely_ clean, as if it just came out of the box."

"A fully blown detective, you are." He tapped and swiped the screen some more. "Well, at least we know it's a Hunter Scroll. Civilian ones don't have an emergency mode."

It was an obscure feature for Huntsman Scrolls, bypassing security measures on a locked Scroll, but the downside was limited access. In emergency mode, the only utilities available to the unknown user were direct calls to a designated HQ contact and weapons summoning but with a much more complex procedure because it's being summoned on a different device.

"Hey, wouldn't you know, weapons summoning is as easy as reading a fingerprint," Tai said, still fumbling about with the device like a kid with a new toy. "No service, though, not even on emergencies."

"It's as if that Scroll isn't registered in the CCT account database."

Tai looked at him, one eyebrow rising.

"It's an assumption, Tai, not a fact."

"And here I thought you managed to access the CCT directly and searched its archives."

Qrow leaned back on his chair. "I'm not foolish enough to try that, even when drunk. But it's not a total leap of logic to assume that is the case." He let out a huge sigh, shoulders slumping. "Still, a lot of other things just don't add up about her."

But that was a lie. He already had his suspicions; he just refused to act on them, because it was so incredulous, impossible, that he had a better chance of landing a shot on the shattered moon with a Dust round than this stupid notion of 'future niece traveling back to the past.'

The face that looks similar to Raven? Coincidence.

A Scroll in her possession that looked to be far more advanced tech-wise than the most expensive Scrolls out right now on the market? Maybe she has a friend who hooked her up with a prototype.

The time stamp on the Scroll claiming it was 12 years in the future? Faulty software. Prototype, after all.

No, he was not crazy thinking about this. Definitely not crazy. And no, he was definitely not overly denying it.

"Qrow," Tai said, setting the Scroll on the table, looking at it with a suspicious eye, his head leaning on his closed hand, forehead on knuckles. He blinked once, and then those dark blue orbs turned towards him. "Just who is she, really? You have any idea?"

_Yes, I do._

He shook his head. "Not a clue."

His friend smirked, and then leaned back on his own chair. "I think you do. And I also think you think that I might think it's crazy of you to think that idea."

"… huh?"

He rolled his eyes, sighing. "As crazy as it sounds, I think she's Yang from the future." He gestured at the Scroll. "Twelve years in the future, according to the date in there. She'd be, uh… seventeen by then."

"Tai, don't tell me you actually—"

His words were lost when they heard screaming from upstairs.

A moment of panic passed between them, mental images of death, destruction, decimation going through their heads, but then that moment passed and Tai stood up from his seat. It was with haste, but not the sort of haste used for life-threatening emergencies. He clambered up the stairs, two at a time. Qrow followed closely behind, forced to rely on the banister to keep from losing his balance as he climbed. When he reached the top, Tai had already disappeared into the farthest room on the right, turning on the lights and speaking words that helped calm the toddler so that her loud cries dissipate to mere sniffs, coughs, and whimpers. Words like "It's okay" and "It's just a nightmare, it's not real" echoed across the hall.

He was four steps from the open door when little Yang walked out of the room, head bowed, a small bead of tears ready to drop from the outer corner of each eye. She spotted him quickly and wiped away the traces that implied she was on the verge of crying like her sister.

Tai was too busy with calming Ruby down, so he guessed it was up to him. He doubted he'd do anything good, though. He always thought he'd be a terrible father—like right now, giving up before even trying—so he decided to just project the image of a not-so-useless uncle with a drinking problem instead. A stupid thing to do, really—why go through all that trouble to begin with?—but it _did_ help him move forward, kneel down in front of Yang, and asked what was wrong. For whatever reason, it helped immensely.

"Ruby had a nightmare," she said, playing with her hair, which flowed down to her shoulders, some curling outward.

"Aah," he said, glancing inside the room. Ruby was on Tai's shoulder, still whimpering and sniffing but more subdued than a few seconds ago. "Well, why'd you leave the room?"

She opened her mouth, then closed it without saying a thing. A second passed, two, three, and within that time, Yang's eyes darted about: to the bedroom, to her pajama-covered feet, to him, back to the bedroom.

"Bathroom," she finally said, but she wasn't convincing anybody, not after that long pause, and some part of her must've known that already but she tried anyway.

"You still thinking about what happened at that old house?"

Yang's head bowed lower and her hands clenched into fists, tightly gripping the hem of her pajama top. She nodded her head, once, twice, then stopped.

"It's okay, Yang," he said, putting his hand on her head. "The good news is that you two are still alive. Now you know how dangerous it is to go out on your own. As long as you don't do it again, then all's forgiven."

"Still grounded."

He retracted his hand and snorted. "Of course you are! Just because all's forgiven doesn't mean you'll be skipping out on your punishment. You do a bad thing, you get punished. That's just how it is, kid."

She nodded. "What about the girl?"

"Hmm?"

"The girl who saved us? Is she okay?"

"She's… still in the hospital. Don't worry."

"I wanna thank her. Can I?"

"She's still being looked after," Tai said by the door. A glimpse in the room showed Ruby was asleep again and sucking on her thumb. "But you can visit her once she's a little better."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Really."

Neither adult told her what the woman sacrificed to save them.

"Now come on, let's get you back to bed."

"Wait a sec, Tai."

Both blonds stopped, looked at him. The woman's Scroll was in his hand and when he gestured it to Tai, he replied with a nod of understanding.

"We could use a little help, kid. Take a look at this," Qrow said.

"What is it?"

"A new type of Scroll, but we've been locked out. We tried unlocking it, but apparently it wants a girl's thumbprint, not us guys."

"Thumb Prince?"

" _Prints_ , kid. Prints." He put his thumb up and pressed it on the Scroll. "Just do it like this."

"And then?"

"And that's it." He tapped the screen and the fingerprint reader popped up, a black box floating on a background of yellow. His first thought was of a bee. His second, a warning sign.

"Okay." She pressed her thumb on the black spot, and as the Scroll took its time to read the contours of Yang's print, he half-expected the software to reject it and splash the screen with red.

The Scroll vibrated, uttered a low sound like fingers snapping, and the simple yellow background gave way to a picture wallpaper that consisted of four young teens, one of which was the woman—the teenage Yang.

After Yang was tucked in bed and they were downstairs again, Qrow had to listen to his friend's annoyed tirade for a minute or two because he ended up cursing in front of his kid.

* * *

**III**

Qrow exited Tushar's office wishing he had smuggled in his vodka flask instead of surrendering it to lobby security. Damn the hospital rules, he wanted a drink right now. He stood there, hands on his face, eyes closed, trying to regain control of himself before he went to visit Yang—the older Yang, lying on a hospital bed, almost unresponsive for the next two days since she awoke. Even now, after knowing what he knew, the idea that the blonde woman just a few floors above him was his niece twelve years in the future boggled his mind far better and quicker than when he last spoke with Raven.

He breathed once, twice, and slid his hands down to his chin, his neck, and quickly dropped them to sway at his sides as he let out one huge sigh. Passersby who looked at him were either sympathetic or indifferent, but none voiced a thing, asking him if he was okay. They just moved on without another glance and maybe within the next minute, they'd already forgotten about him, too busy with their own problems and woes to give more thought on a complete stranger they saw right outside a famous (or infamous) doctor's office. He was certain they mistook something from his demeanor. Oh sure, he stood right outside a doctor's office looking downtrodden and tired, clothes unkempt from a long day of serving the greater good, and his eyes probably sported dark circles under them and a bit of bloodshot red _in_ them, but that didn't mean he was diagnosed with a terminal condition or something.

_Fuck it_ , he thought, _let 'em think what they want to think._

He, however, couldn't express that sort of freedom of thinking on himself, because if he did, then he'd still be in denial. Despite the many attempts he tried to debunk the notion that this new Yang wasn't really Yang, he was surprised to discover that when the ironclad proof of Yang's identity was presented to him, surprise never once came to him. Some part of him had already believed. Believed like Tai fully had, since that night they perused the various pictures in that Scroll's gallery.

Retouching some pictures to make it look like this Yang was a student at Beacon Academy wouldn't be difficult to do, but the gallery was loaded with _hundreds_ of photos in Beacon, each telling a story that slowly played out the pre-initiation meetups, the post-initiation partying, first-day classes, normal teen girl hijinks, and lots of group photos and self-shots (it explained the need for a Scroll to have a front camera, too). And none looked retouched, if at all. Except for a few, but those ones only added captions that further included details of the who, what, where, when, and/or why for the picture. The need to include a number sign before each word confused him, though. Was that a future trend or something?

_The fuck does #selfie mean anyway?_

Anyway, what truly put doubt in him was the presence of Ruby—because nobody other than Summer could capture the unique color of those silver eyes—in those pictures. Four girls, including Yang and Ruby, were the main cast of the gallery. A black-haired bookworm who rarely smiled but was subjected to quite a few inopportune photoshoots and a primly girl with white hair and very pale skin that left little doubt she was a Schnee. Four girls, which meant they were a team, which was named RWBY according to what he remembered from Tushar's info-gathering. But Ruby and Yang were both on the same team. He could understand if Yang was supposed to be a third-year and got held back twice, but the thought of the little ball of sunshine being so inept to be at that level was ludicrous. It wouldn't explain how well coordinated she had been when fending off those Beowolves with a very low Aura, either.

That left Ruby getting enrolled to Beacon two years early. Maybe.

There was a story behind it, but that would have to come later. Because he still had some doubts, he had Tushar perform a DNA test, which took both time and a huge chunk from his savings, but if it was to have ironclad proof of a time-traveling relative, then that was money he'd be glad to spend. The results were as he expected already: an exact match with his child niece.

_Should I show Tai the results, though?_

As he made his way to Yang's hospital room, he pondered over that thought. It was not as if Tai needed more proof to be convinced that he now had two daughters with the same name but with an age gap of twelve years, give or take a few months. Qrow kind of wished his friend would be more cautious like him, but he also kind of wished he'd stay the same, as contradictory as that sounded.

No, he supposed the DNA test would be his little secret. Just something he went the extra mile to help cement the fact into his head that there was a time-traveling person right inside that room where Taiyang Xiao Long just exited and—

_Say what now?_

He blinked. His eyes weren't playing tricks on him, and at the moment he was mostly sober. Tai really did just come out of Yang's hospital room, closing the door behind him, smiling and looking so at ease, and when the blond saw him down the hall, the smile morphed into a grin and he waved him over.

With a sigh and feeling stupid for not foreseeing this, he briskly walked towards Tai.

"What are you doing here?" Qrow asked, as if things weren't obvious enough. Taiyang plus Yang in hospital equals worried parent visiting his child who's twelve years removed.

And acting like he _knew_ the question was rhetorical, he said, "Nice meeting you, too, Qrow. Didn't expect to bump into you here. Visiting hours is almost over, though."

He gave another sigh. "Is this your first visit, Tai?"

Tai nodded. "Yeah."

"What about the girls?"

"Came here alone. Hired a babysitter."

"I'm guessing you still haven't told Little Sunshine about Teeny Sunshine's arm… and the other thing."

Tai shook his head and crossed his arms. "No on both accounts, but really, Qrow? Teeny Sunshine?"

He shrugged. "Teenager, teen, teeny. It makes sense." A random thought suddenly came to him and he voiced it out without thinking, "Huh, maybe I should change the Little to Tiny."

"Your funeral, then," Tai said, but a second later, he chuckled, saying, "Did you actually make a joke?"

He shrugged again, but he felt a ghost of a smile on his lips.

"But seriously, Tai," he said, his voice now somber. He leaned his back on the wall beside the door to Yang's room, crossing his arms as well. "Why are you here?"

"Visiting her, of course," Tai replied. "I still had to thank her for saving the girls."

"And you didn't tell me, because…?"

"You were busy with a mission _and_ I thought it'd be obvious I'd visit her."

Qrow opened his mouth, but then closed it, sighing a third time. "Yeah, you got me there."

"To be honest, I wanted you with me when I visited, but you weren't answering my calls, and I couldn't wait any longer and… you know."

"Yeah… I do." Glimpsing the door through the corner of his eye, he asked, "How'd she take it?"

"About the whole _other stuff_?" he said with air quotes. Tai caught on quick to keeping the time-traveling aspect a secret, although they should really think of a better code word than that. "Well, she was shocked to say the least, but I guess she already had her suspicions so she wasn't all wide-eyed and calling bullshit. Heck, I think she was more shocked _I_ knew already."

"And you told her how you knew."

"I had to. I couldn't lie to her about that."

"Didn't expect you to, but…"—here, Qrow looked away, rubbed his nape—"it's gonna be a little tougher talking to her now."

"I don't know. I expected her to be more than a little pissed at me with looking at her Scroll, but she must've understood I had to be sure she was who says she was."

"I see."

"So go on in and talk to her. Like I said, visiting hours is almost over. I believe she'll be happy to see you."

_Yeah, she's sure to be happy meeting an uncle who's known her for only five years, but not yet the other twelve._

Qrow said, "If you say so. And visiting hours don't really matter to me. I have a special arrangement with the doctor assigned to her."

"Oh." A pause. Then: "What sort of arrangement?"

"That's up to Teeny to decide. I want to ask her some questions about her circumstances, what she intends to do from now on, the whole nine."

"For what purpose?"

"Tai, whether you accept it or not, Teeny is an anomaly. Her identity is practically a mess right now."

The words _at this time_ remained unsaid, but he got the point across regardless. How her time-traveling came about was a mystery, especially to Yang herself, and because of that, there was no telling if she could return to her own time. Maybe she could, maybe not, and if the latter were to be the case, Qrow wanted her to fall on a safety net than towards an uncertain bottom. He knew _he'd_ feel lost if he ended up time-traveling to the past and meeting familiar faces who meant shit to you because they wore the faces of the people you grew up with yet they would never feel like they _did_ grow up with you. Sure, they could pretend on some level—Tai was determined to make her feel welcomed, if not part of the family as she always was in her old world—but the knowledge that she didn't belong here might forever haunt her. You're the unnecessary cog in a machine, her mind would say; the extra line unneeded in a drawing, it'd say; the novel scene that does nothing but bloat the story as a whole, it'd say; you're something alien, something disposable, and the world will still turn even with you gone. Someone already had her place in this world, and that someone was her younger self. What was her purpose here, then?

Qrow continued, "But I'm here to help her."

Tai most likely hadn't thought that far ahead. His face looked kind of lost, uncertain. Then he nodded. "All right. If there's anything I can do to help, just ask."

"You got two kids to worry about, and I only have to look out for one teenager. I'll be fine, Tai."

"You've never raised teens before, though."

"I teach part-time at Signal, remember? I got experience."

Tai frowned. "Let's just hope that's enough. I'm going on ahead now. I'm leaving her to you, bro."

Tai took one final look at the door, patted him on the shoulder, and walked away. Qrow watched him go, all the way to when he came to the stairs and descended them. Still, he stayed like that for a second, then another passed, a third, fourth, fifth, listening to the whispery background noise of feet shuffling on the concrete floor and the voice of a news anchor shilling out the latest incidents from the world in the nearby rec room. He then gave out another, longer sigh before facing the door next to him. Pushing himself off the wall, putting his hand on the knob, but hesitating to turn it, he thought of what expression he was supposed to have when first meeting Teeny.

He shook his head. Such an irrelevant thought. It probably mattered little at this point. He checked his backpocket and felt the familiar lump of paper that told him the teen behind this door was his niece. He didn't know why he took strength from that. He honestly didn't know.

_Really regretting not smuggling that flask in here._

With that thought circling his head, he turned the knob and officially met with his third niece.

"Uncle Qrow! _Please_ tell me you smuggled in some alcohol."


	3. Identity

/ — — **CHAPTER 3** — — \

**Identity**

**I**

She kind of figured her uncle Qrow would make an appearance soon. The fact that his appearance came about a minute after her Dad's was, in truth, irrelevant, because she already had the best ice-breaker on hand.

"Uncle Qrow!" she said, not at all bothering to tone down her excitement. " _Please_ tell me you smuggled in some alcohol."

He stayed in the doorway, blinking, slightly gawking at her, before sighing and closing the door after him. "Sorry, kid," he said, finding his cool in no time, "but alcohol is forbidden in the hospital, so no."

Yang rolled her eyes. "That's why I said smuggled not brought."

"Believe me, if I had something on me, I'd have been drinking from it by now."

"Point."

There was a moment of silence between them, staring, looking away, staring again, as Qrow made his way to the bed and sat himself on the bedside chair her father had used when he visited.

Spotting the differences between this version of her uncle and the one she knew from her time would be difficult if she were to try and look for something beyond superficiality. For one thing, this younger uncle had less of a five o'clock shadow and barely any dark rings under his eyes. His cape, usually dark red and torn and wouldn't be so out of place when in possession of a hobo, was vibrant in color, neat, and presentable, as if it were newly bought. His clothes, however, remained almost the same. She wasn't at all surprised; he had been sporting that style since he was young and a member of the complete team STRQ.

"How are you feeling?" he asked, quite relaxed in his stance, elbows on his knees, arms bent inward with his hands hung down and close to touching. What gave away his nervousness was one-handedly cracking his knuckles with his thumb on each hand. Crack went the forefingers. Crack went the middle fingers. Crack went the ring fingers.

"A lot better than before," she said, mimicking her answer when Dad asked her that same question earlier. Crack went the pinkies. She looked at his hands directly this time, and from the moment she did so, his hands suddenly played possum. "You've always told me you'll kick that habit soon."

"Have I?"

It hurt a little, hearing him say that. He meant nothing about it, of course, but that question alone kind of further cemented the fact that she was stuck in the past somehow. It was shocking to learn it from her Dad—who also hadn't changed much from this time to her own, other than, like Uncle Qrow, the thinner facial hair—and got more surreal as her mind got some time to fully process that bombshell.

"It's a telltale sign you're nervous, you know," she said, trying to smile lopsidedly at him, but her eyes never left those hands and she found her hands clenching. Hands? No, just her left. That sensation in her right was only a phantom.

"Oh."

It was both amazing and odd that there was less… subdue-ness? Was that the right word or even _a_ word? Fuck it. Anyway, less subdue-ness in her uncle's voice. He still sounded gruff and serious, but it was like looking at a red velvet curtain all your life but now, at some point, it had changed into a veil with thin, see-through fabric.

"Yeah. Spoiler alert," she said, and this time her smile, after a little more reminiscing, was slightly more natural, "you never kicked that habit."

The tension in him lessened. He looked at his hands, sighed through his nose. "Am I really that easy to read?"

"Only to your family, maybe. Ruby can read you better than I do, actually."

"Uh huh, right." He took something from his front pocket. "Here, before I forget."

"My Scroll!" She made a grab for it but missed. A moment later she realized why: She had tried to use her right hand again. The hand that was no longer there, nothing more than a phantom. She took a deep breath, looked at the stump, and grabbed the device with her left hand.

Her uncle looked like he had something to say, but at the last second, he leaned back on his chair and stayed silent, his eyes darting away from her.

She was unsure of what to say as well, and she'd rather not talk about the life-changing injury, the one that her mind (and her heart) had the gall to blame it on Qrow because he had arrived too late to save it.

 _He saved the rest of you_ , the other half of her thought. _That has to count for a lot, right?_

_But he only managed to save anyone because you were there! You were there to give him enough time to arrive. It cost you an arm for him to save the day, so yes, this sure as fucking hell counts for a lot. Is this sarcasm or not? You fucking decide._

"I'm…" Qrow said, going quiet for a moment, then continuing, "I'm sorry about what happened."

He was cracking his knuckles again, but the joints had nothing left to pop.

"It's not your fault, Qrow," she said almost instantly, and she could tell it held as much sincerity as a haggard-looking nurse giving her condolences. A part of her—and how dismaying it was to realize that it wasn't even a _small_ part of her—absolutely refused to let this go. "I got reckless and paid for it, that's all."

Except she wouldn't have resorted to recklessness if he had gotten there on time as he was supposed to. How she wanted to say this to him right here, right now, the anger in her rising like magma in a volcano that's close to erupting. She wanted to speak out, would've done so, too… if she hadn't had the last three days to think everything over. Waking up minus one arm had been an excruciating emotional roller coaster ride and having to make her non-dominant hand pick up the slack felt like that arm was in the process of being amputated as the muscles screamed for respite, and on the last two sleepless nights she had, trying and failing to close her eyes and open them to the morning sun, there had been plenty of time to _really_ think.

The anger hadn't disappeared. In truth, the thinking helped clear her head, but feeling it trying to sweep away the anger was akin to taking off two floors from a building as tall as the CCT—it was too high for just a few days of cooling off. But at least she regained much of her self-control to realize that screaming at her uncle would not help matters.

Her arm was gone. The sooner she accepted that was irreversible, the better.

Yang got derailed from her musings with Qrow's next question. She didn't know how much the silence between them had gone on for—that subjective experience with time again—but she ironically had no time to think much on it.

Qrow asked, "Then have you encountered time-traveling before?"

"Huh?"

"Do you remember being saved by your future self back then? When _you_ were a kid, I mean?"

"No, you actually got there on time—"

She stopped, said nothing more, but she didn't really need any more words for Qrow to understand the implication.

His eyes were wide as he took in a deep breath. Both hands clenched, and more joints popped. "I was supposed to save you two." Then he looked at her stump, his eyes more expressive than she remembered, more innocent than she remembered, and the way those eyes lost a little bit of its luster made her want to verbally tell him to stop that, this wasn't like him. And that sinister part of her seemed to be smirking, urging her to push the stump right in front of his face because why the fuck not? She snuffed that thought out. Irrational anger was ripping out of its flimsy cage. Take control. Take control. "And I failed."

"No," she said, putting a hand on her bicep ( _a_ hand? Why _a_ hand? That implies she still has more than one. So why not _the_ hand or _her_ hand, now that she only had one?), and she stayed calm, in spite of a phantom itch building in her phantom limb, becoming more potent as this conversation dragged on, and the aches—not just from phantoms but also the tired muscles in her

_(remaining)_

other hand—did their best to breach through her poker face. " _I_ failed. If you hadn't been there, all three of us would've been dead."

"But I was supposed to be on time."

Yang didn't argue past that point. There was a time she would've gone on and on until her uncle gave in, but now with the way she was now, holding anger in a cage that was close to breaking, she found this argument too tiresome to bother continue. Maybe they'd continue at another time at another place, when she had more time to cool off and the anger wasn't doing its best to color her actions.

Silence between them again. Tick, tock, tick, tock.

Then: "I'll be handling the paperwork," he said.

She expected the topic change. In fact, she welcomed it wholeheartedly. "What paperwork?"

"Your records, of course," he said, his position and voice relaxed. "Birth certificate and others. Stuff you need for a new identity in this time."

"What? But—"

"Sunshine, do you remember how you ended up in the past?"

"I… no, but—"

"Which is why your identity needs to be established. Now I'm not forcing you to take up a new identity or anything, but with how uncertain this whole situation you're in is, I think it's a lot better if the Kingdom knows you as a legal resident of Vale."

"But why do all this work at all?"

"Because I'd feel better if we can cover all our bases. Right now, you're an unknown, someone outside the system. With this, you can live with little hassle compared to immigrants who move into the city from villages outside."

"I… see." Somewhat. Maybe. She sighed. "I guess I'll have to get used to some new name you picked out for me."

For the first time in a while, Qrow smiled broadly. "Oh that's the beauty of it, Sunshine," he said, chuckling a little. "You don't have to. I already filed some of the first batch of paperwork with your real name."

"Huh? You used my real name? You serious?"

"Very. It's all about simplicity. Simplicity in the paperwork, simplicity in your adaption. Besides, this isn't at all an identity nightmare as you might think. You know your father's side of the family originated from Vacuo, right?"

"Yeah."

"Well, apparently the Xiao Longs have a big and convoluted family tree. It's not even uncommon for cousins within a generation to have the same name. _Multiple_ cousins. First, second, third, how many times removed, what have you. So I wrote down you're Tai's first cousin, who got her name from her Auntie, who happens to lack originality when naming her son, who happens to inherit that naming disability and gave his daughter her mother's name because why not. See? Simple."

"I don't… what—" She paused, then shook her head, waving away the thought. _Follow Qrow's example: simplicity. The Xiao Long family loves naming relatives the same, simple as that._ "And people will buy that?"

Qrow snorted, then smiled. "Vacuo survived with multiple people having the same name, why can't Vale? What, do you think the Kingdom's unprepared for _two_ Yang Xiao Longs?"

The smile was infectious, and on her face it was almost predatory. "Hmm, they might not be. The question, then, will be... _Xiao Long_ do you think Vale will last? Eh?"

His smile disappeared.

"What?" she asked.

He shook his head, sighing then murmuring something, but her ears failed to pick up the words except for the last one: "… daughter."

"Moving back on topic," Qrow said, scratching the side of his head, "are you okay with this arrangement? Any suggestions or changes you want to make?"

"I'm still trying to get my head wrapped up in all this," she said. She lay down, faced the ceiling, blew off a lone strand of hair on her face. "Heck, I'm still trying to get used to being in the past! Sometimes I feel like I've crash landed on some alien planet."

"Well, at least you won't be alone in this alien planet."

_Alone…_

It should've been a depressing thought, but…

"Hey, Uncle Qrow," she said, sitting up again, "do you think you can use your network to look for some people?"

He blinked at her. Then said, "What network?"

She rolled her eyes. "Some spy network or something you're involved with. You've always been secretive about your work, but I know some shady activities when I see 'em." She hoped her smile was disarming enough. Ugh, _disarming_ … fucking badum tss, haha. She was going to avoid that word now. "Besides, forging papers and making them legit requires a lot of elbow grease."

"Seriously, Yang, I have no idea what you're talking about," he said without flinching.

She sighed. Of course, he'd still deny its existence if he could still get away with it. Her evidence didn't really stack up because it was, in the first place, mostly circumstantial. "Just… keep an eye out for cases like me."

"Why? You think you're not the only time-traveler?"

A small voice inside her said, _No, I'm definitely alone._ She ignored it.

"I don't know," she said. "This whole thing is strange in and of itself. Should we discount that possibility from the get-go?"

"No, I guess not." It took another two seconds for him to realize whom she meant. "You suspect it's the rest of your team?"

"And whoever else was on that train. They might've gotten transported here with me."

"And you're sure of that?"

She shook her head. "I can't be. We split up in that train, fighting the bad guys on separate cars. I can't even be sure if it affected just the car I was in or the whole fucking train. But again if this happened to me, then—"

"It could happen to them as well." He put a hand to his mouth, where the gap between the forefinger and thumb was under his nose but above his mouth. "Never considered that before. But wouldn't they also be in Patch if that were the case? Nothing else unusual other than you happened, though."

That voice again said, _Of course they would've, but they didn't because they aren't here at all._

She shrugged. "Time-travel is one random mistress, maybe? I was in an underground tunnel between Vale and Mountain Glenn, but then suddenly appeared in the middle of Patch. The others must've appeared somewhere else, too."

"Hopefully it's not the middle of the ocean."

She grimaced.

Noticing her discomfort, he said, "Sorry, Sunshine, but we can't dismiss any and all possibilities. Anyway, I'll look out for them in case they do show up. What're their names?"

"There's Ruby—yes, _our_ Ruby, she skipped two years—Weiss Schnee, and Blake Belladonna. Oh, uh, and Blake's a cat Faunus, by the way."

"A Schnee and a Faunus in the same team together. They must be quite civil with each other."

"They have their ups and downs, but all in all, we're a solid team together."

"I'll take your word for it."

Afterwards, Yang decided to iron out the details of her new identity with Qrow. Officially, she was Yang Xiao Long, cousin to Taiyang Xiao Long, whom she'd have to start calling by name. Well, she already had experience on that front, having a short-lived rebellious stage when she was fifteen, but training herself to do so again without flashing back to that dark spot in her history every time would prove to be quite a challenge.

Qrow's visit lasted only two hours. Each had more to discuss, but after Yang's fifth or so yawn, Qrow told her to get some rest and they'd continue this some other time. She, after all, still had another week stay in this room. They said their goodbyes, and Yang ended up staring at the ceiling, while clenching and unclenching her hand. Tired as she was, sleep would come in time, but right now, she was left alone—

_Alone…_

—with her thoughts.

There was something she hadn't told her uncle about, something she refused to acknowledge. That quiet little voice was telling her a truth she refused to confront, but now, alone—

_Alone…_

—in this dark room, the shattered moon at the window showing in full and shining with borrowed, dim light, there was very little in the way of distractions and detours.

When she awoke in that forest, with the mist surrounding her, thick and cold and damp, the fact that she knew right away she was in Patch puzzled her. Then _and_ now. She knew and accepted the fact without reason. It wasn't a hunch, wasn't a spark of recognition, although it did play a part in making her believe it quicker.

_I'm not alone…_

Which was why she refused to believe that she was the only person to have been sent back here. It was a truth, a fact, she didn't want to admit, even to herself. Something in her head told her she was the sole time-traveler, the only one in that train to have traveled back here in this time, but accepting it would mean—

_I'm not alone…_

She focused on her hand. Clench, unclench. Clench, unclench. And at some point, she was unsure when, she lifted her hand to her face, its heel pushing the spot between her eyes, just atop the bridge of her nose. Pushing, pushing, as if doing so would hold back the despair wrecking everything inside her to stay where it was.

She allowed herself one sniff, one hitched breath, and one wipe of her eyes. That was all.

_I'm not alone…_

* * *

**II**

Home sweet home.

A nice phrase to see play out, because home would always have that warmth it alone could provide. It soothes the soul, washes away the aches, the pains, gives a sense of safety within its walls. It was an ideal place to heal.

That should've been the case when Yang checked out of the hospital and traveled to Casa de Xiao Long, but like all the houses and buildings she and Qrow had passed on their way here, seeing the house she grew up in did not invoke the kind of feelings she thought it should. The feel of home was muffled, as if it'd been submerged at the bottom of the ocean.

As her eyes scanned the place, a feeling of wrongness washed over her, a pervasive feeling that was both familiar and unfamiliar, like grabbing a chocolate chip cookie and belatedly realizing it was oatmeal raisin.

They hadn't even stepped in yet and the wrongness had already started. For one thing, the front door was different. When she was fifteen (and stupidly rebellious), she got drunk for the first time and wrecked the foyer. That door she now stood in front of was solid olden oak, stained dark, boasting an intricate little decor Dad had bought as a souvenir from his reunion trip to Vacuo while lamenting the several claw scratches and dents that littered its bottom half, although the damages were far less than she remembered (as it should, because Due the dog had yet to make them). That door on that drunken night had been unsalvageable after Yang was done with it, and she was forced to pay for the repairs, including the replacement door (thank God, Dad took pity and went for something cheap but sturdy). Skip forward a little to her final year in Signal, whenever she came home from school, she recalled a dark cabin door consisting of thin wooden boards standing in file with a square glass window embedded at the top center. Now—in a present that should've been the past—it was back to the solid oak with its Vacuen amulet for warding off bad luck.

Almost without thinking, she grabbed the amulet gently in her hand and pulled down, letting it slide off her palm, like a religious man rubbing a holy item hanging on his rear mirror before driving.

"Careful," Qrow said, hands in his pockets, "you might absorb the bad mojo."

She snorted. "You don't believe in this stuff."

"Do you?"

She hummed before answering. "Half-and-half, actually. Some of that Vacuen superstition rubbed off on me growing up."

"But not enough to avoid incurring bad luck?"

She smirked. "I make my own luck, Uncle Qrow."

He grunted, stepped forward, and knocked on the door. He ignored her look of panic. "Better start dropping the uncle, Sunshine. I'm like your cousin-in-law now."

At the moment she couldn't care less about the correction; she was busy keeping her legs from bolting out of there. She never thought the wrongness would instill a level of fear that made her want to live in seclusion.

"Daddy," a voice from inside said, "someone's at the door!"

Yang gulped, rubbed her right shoulder, and took deep breaths. She felt a hand on her own, squeezing.

"Hey," Qrow said, "it's not the end of the world, kid." He didn't say she should calm down; he knew it was as pointless as people telling him he should sober up. He gestured with his eyes to the door and the approaching footsteps beyond it. "They're family."

_Family._

It brought a smile to her face. Small and tense, but a smile all the same. Its existence, however, lasted only until the front door swung open, going inward, her ears picking up the tiny thud the Vacuen amulet made on wood before her father said their names. He, on the other hand, had no trouble smiling at her at all.

"Hey, Da—"

Yang stopped, shook her head, tried again.

"Hey, Tai." She felt like a rebel again. It displeased her, although a part of her still derived pleasure from the act, a kind of taste of freedom only her teen mind would like. Wow, and here she thought she had moved past that stage in her life.

"Come on in," he beckoned, stepping out of the way.

Qrow sauntered forth without hesitation, and Yang, keeping her eyes forward, followed him. It was like… well, like stepping into the past, but she never thought a simile would be literal, and though it was the same home she had lived in for the past seventeen years, the differences were staggering. Old furniture had returned, some picture frames were missing, the height chart on the foyer column didn't have Ruby's growth record yet, and the foyer's flooring had reverted to its original creaky floorboards. She stepped on the squeaky spot a few times and couldn't help laughing.

_Dear God I actually missed that creak._

Qrow coughed behind her. Both guys were staring at her.

Cheeks pink, she said, "The foyer got remodeled." She made the floor cry again to hammer home her point.

"Ah," Tai said. "Yeah, I can see why the floorboards'll need changing. They gave out at some point, didn't they?"

She simply nodded, not having the heart to tell him she thrashed the floor while drunk after doing a number on the front door.

"Well, let's not dally. I'll show you to your room, Yang."

Living again in here was Tai's idea, and though Yang at first seemed hesitant, reasoning came forth to smother that thought. Qrow might have done wonders in creating a new identity for her—even going so far as to ensure she keeps her original name—but she realized early on that trying to live alone in Vale or in Patch would require a lot of funds she did not have. Her uncle and even her Dad would chip in to keep her afloat for the next few months or so—that's just how they are, no matter if it's the past or present—but getting a job with her age, her shady credentials, and her disability would be an uphill battle at best. Her stump still gave her pain, both from the still-healing injury and the unforgettable memory of a Beowolf mangling it till she passed out. While pain was no stranger to her, it made it difficult for her to get a prosthetic. Doctor Tushar said that phantom pain was common for amputees, though their intensity varies from person to person, and there was a good chance the pain would subside in the coming months, but at the moment, her injury was too sensitive for anything other than bandages and the best alleviation other than the natural healing of her Aura was some prescribed painkillers.

In a nutshell, she was dependent, and she disliked it.

As they walked through the corridor, Yang took a glance at the living room and saw two kids and a small dog watching Sunday morning cartoons with an old glass television. Hologram technology was still in its infancy during this time, and while holographic televisions were already available, their prices were crippling for anyone below upper-middle class. The kids never noticed them passing, more focused on the action and adventure of a five-man team battling evil in colorful costumes. Oh! She remembered this old episode—but holy shit, she didn't remember the dialogue being _this_ corny!

"Yang?"

She then realized she had stopped at the archway between the corridor and the living room, caught in memories that were replaying in reality. Just as she was about to catch up with Tai and Qrow, someone else mistook the call and saw her at the archway.

Her younger self gasped, startling Ruby and the dog, and dashed towards her like a missile.

"Auntie Yang!" she said, hugging her leg without reservation, and she was so light, so small, that Yang didn't even need to brace for impact. "You're here!"

A smile worked its way to her lips almost unconsciously. Those young lilac eyes shone with wonder and excitement, and though a part of her was still feeling some disconcertion, the innocence and joy of a child—pardon the pun (but not really)—outshone that pessimistic side of her.

The two Yangs had already met yesterday after much insistence from the little one, whose sole recognition of her savior was the bright blonde hair that was the same shade as her own. It made her wonder what reaction she'd have once she realized they also share the same name. And the same eye color. Yang tried to think of the situation in her five-year-old self's shoes, but it was difficult pinning an exact reaction. So many things had happened in the coming years that she'd lost the thoughts and motivations of what made her childhood tick. When Young Yang had her first good look at her, she blew expectations when she _still_ gravitated on her hair and left everything else on the wayside.

It was an impression that stuck, because Young Yang looked doubly amazed after knowing her name and everything else, and though the conversation had gone to Yang's stump, Yang did her best to be positive about it, despite inwardly feeling the opposite. She hated her current state, and though it was a sacrifice she took pride in, she still hated it. Did that make her selfish, wanting to save someone dear without having to sacrifice _something_ dear? She didn't know. Even after more than a week in bed, alone with her thoughts, she barely gave attention to that particular topic.

"You didn't say Auntie Yang will come today," Young Yang said to her dad and uncle, looking peeved. "Why?"

"Surpriiiiise," Qrow replied, but did so with half-hearted excitement, a drawl in his tone that made Yang picture a clown who hated his job. Maybe it was the vodka speaking. "I guess."

 _Definitely the vodka_ , Yang thought as she rubbed her younger self's head. The dog, a corgi (naturally), walked cautiously towards her, nose up and sniffing. It tilted his head to the side, whining a bit at her. She could guess the reason—having two scents that smell exactly the same, but coming from two different humans must be confusing as hell for the corgi—but she doubted that was the case. Maybe it was something else, maybe it was the smell of the second-hand clothes Qrow provided from an unknown source (she'd rather not know at all, really). She was unsure, but she knew the dog and knew when and how he died. She couldn't hold back her smile from growing bigger that she could imagine it reaching her ears.

After rubbing the young girl's head, Yang held her hand out to the dog she once knew. "Hey, Due. Come here, boy."

Again, Due remained cautious, sniffing her fingers first before moving closer. Then he enjoyed the expert petting he received. God, how she missed this dog.

"She got out of the hospital early, sweetie," Tai said to Young Yang, looking to the living room and beckoning for the shy little red riding hood to him. "We were surprised as well. And starting today, she'll be living with us."

"Really?!"

"Yep," Qrow said, giving Young Yang his own head rub, which made more of a mess than when Yang did it, not that the kid minded all that much. But in time she would; she saw a glimpse of that spark of annoyance, and it only took a spark to get a fire going, after all. "But you'll have plenty of time to get to know her later. At this rate, you're gonna miss the rest of the show."

Young Yang gasped and dashed straight back into the living room. Due looked between his blonde master and the blonde master petter (hehe). He barked once at her, his version of a welcome greeting, and sauntered back to the couch to watch the rest of the show with Young Yang. Ruby followed her sister's lead without even greeting her new aunt, but that was all right. Yang understood. Ruby was the shyest kid at that age. It'd take a while—days or weeks—for her to come around, but as of this moment, Yang was content to give the girl some space. In truth, she had to force herself to stop staring her retreating figure like a stalker.

Merely relying on half-forgotten memories and old baby pictures to project a toddler Ruby was like watching a live concert recorded through a Scroll with a bad camera and microphone. The records did so little justice at how cute she was in real life that if not for self-restraint, she would've eaten her up right then and there. She was just so dangerously adorable!

"I think you scared her," Qrow said.

"Huh?"

"Ruby. I think she sensed danger from you."

She cocked an eyebrow. "What the hell does that mean?"

"It just means you shouldn't smile like that at her."

_Huh?_

"Ease up, Qrow," Tai said, hands on his hips. "Ruby just has that effect on people."

"I'll watch myself more closely," Yang said to Qrow. "But you can't deny she's incredibly cute."

Qrow looked away, shifted his weight on the other leg, and tried his best to look like he either disagreed or was neutral about it, but both blondes knew how attached he was to the girl. Sighing, he said, "Yeah, I guess I can't."

"Come on," Tai said, "let's get you to your room. After that I'll give you a tour of the house and—"

"Kind of pointless if she's lived here for seventeen years, Tai," Qrow muttered.

"… Point. But you may never know? The foyer got remodeled— _gets_ remodeled?— _will get_ remodeled? Ah screw it, you know what I mean. Who's to say anything else in the house got a facelift?"

Qrow looked at her, expression hidden from Tai, who was halfway up the stairs but looking down at them. He mouthed _facelift_ with a cocked eyebrow and a lopsided smirk, and she smothered her laughter. Her resistance slowly crumbled when Qrow poked his own cheek and pushed it up, causing his eye to wink at her.

Tai frowned. "What'd I say?"

Yang relented and laughed. This banter between them… she had almost forgotten how friendly they had been in her childhood.

"Nothing," Qrow said, climbing up the steps.

Tai sighed and let the matter drop, and Yang followed them up. She felt that pervasive wrongness come over her again as she ascended, and this time she found a word for it.

The word seemed right—felt right, too, but again, choco chip could be oatmeal raisin—and had accurately echoed her earlier thoughts, as early as when she first came to be in this strange world. The wrongness of everything was still there, but at least she now had something concrete to put the feeling in, something to give it shape, give it a more detailed definition, something to at least wrap up the mixed emotions building up whenever she thought of the door amulet or the creaky floorboard or the old shows she'd see again on TV or even the people she knew and loved de-aged by over a decade.

She sighed. It was official.

"Nostalgia isn't what it used to be."

* * *

**III**

_**I'm going through changes** _

The quote smacked at Yang's mind as she looked at her hand. Her _only_ hand now.

She couldn't help responding with, "A lot of changes."

She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, picked up the toothpaste, and applied some on the brush that was squeezed under her armpit. Something normally done under five seconds now took ten, and the brushing was awkward. Even after the rinse, Yang felt like she had done the brushing job half-assed. It was a lot worse with her hair. Most first thought of her hair can be the definition of 'untamable,' much like her spirit and personality, but in reality it was a combination of both worlds: taming the untamable, which was a grueling endeavor without time to thoroughly brush every strand from root to end. She did the best she could with one hand, but already a week in and she could see that the pristine she aspired her hair to be every day was gradually moving out of her reach.

Things could go smoother if she started using a prosthesis, but her stump left her… well, _stumped_. It attracted phantom pains like a flower attracted bees eager for some pollination, but at least real bees could only sting once. The phantom pains were bees with infinite lives. Infinite. Painkillers helped with the aches, but they dulled the rest of her senses, so she never took more than twice a day: one in the morning, another in the late afternoon.

And this was just the start of how much she had taken her dominant hand for granted.

One prime example was dining. Her first dining experience with her family-of-the-past highlighted her as the disabled needing to be treated like a baby. It was easier back in the hospital, because the staff had experience with people who had lost their dominant hand, so her diet was both simple and enjoyable (for hospital food, anyway). Tai, however, had no prior experience to one-handed people and had not thought ahead about the difficulties. His steak dinner was cooked with good intentions—a rushed checking-out-of-the-hospital celebration for a person he never expected to come that day—but she needed two hands to work the fork and knife. Tai actually cringed when he realized it, looking the most shame-faced she had seen him, before offering to cut the meat for her. Things got a little awkward when after cutting a small portion and smothering the top with mashed potatoes, he tried to feed it to her, too, as if she had reverted to a toddler being first introduced to solid foods. God, even Ruby stared at her! Probably wondering why a grown woman needed help feeding herself when a toddler like her could do it already without making a big mess. And while her younger self tried her best to look discreet, curiosity always seemed to win over her better judgment, taking glances when she thought she could get away with it. Dad, too panicked about his steak blunder, realized his other blunder three seconds after he hovered the loaded fork next to her mouth and promptly handed the utensil to her, pink cheeks going red, cringing harder all the while. After her first bite and Tai offering to _just_ cut the rest of the meat, Qrow said he needed to use the bathroom, but both blondes knew the truth, because the drunkard's shoulders shook like mad as he exited the room.

Finished with the bathroom—or at least satisfied with her toothbrushing—Yang walked back to her bedroom and closed the door. The view from the window gave a picturesque depiction of the vast forest of Patch in the very early dawn. Light had yet to fully step into the day, so she took a moment to gaze at the retreating navy blue of the night as the stars blinked dimly before the next hour rendered them invisible. The sun would come above the horizon behind her in time, and despite knowing she needn't rush, she felt she had to. Something about jogging before the coming dawn seemed like a dream come true. A dream that _had_ come true thousands of times, really, thousands of days before this one. So why was today any different?

Stupid question. She only had to look to her right to find the answer. It wasn't a _satisfactory_ answer, much less a detailed one, but something about it rang true in her head, and that mattered most in a way.

_A dream come true for a woman deciding to step back into the game. Going through changes, indeed._

She shook her head, smiling lopsidedly, and went on to the arduous task of getting into her jogging wear one-handed. It was nothing fancy and its practicality could be questioned, because when she and Dad went out shopping for clothes, there was very little thought in getting anything for athletics. She was still in the healing period, after all, so that would come at a later time, but a week indoors with nothing to do but play with the kids (which never gets old, unless Young Yang decides to pull on her hair just to see her get mad), watch shows she either watched before or held none of her interest then and now, and do chores in the clumsiest way imaginable, _anyone_ would inevitably become stir-crazy. Yang wanted out, if only for a while to stretch her legs and get some fresh air.

She came downstairs and out the front door wearing an orange wife-beater shirt, black undershorts, and white strap-on sneakers.

Again, nothing fancy, practicality in question. It was early fall already, but the air had yet to reach a temperature that had people pulling out their winter coats from deep in the closet. She was still comfortable out here, despite showing so much skin. In truth, her current getup actually reminded her of the sleepwear she used back in Beacon, but no one else needed to know that. Besides, it wasn't as if people would be out at this hour to ogle at her figure… or if they'd ogle at all, what with the ugly missing-arm issue she had.

She recalled the usual route she took for her morning jogs as she did some of her stretches. It was a six-mile run back-and-forth. Yang thought this was a reasonable start after two weeks of inactivity. When her warm-up stretches were done, she took two deep breaths, letting each out in a quick huff, and started jogging.

Her feet hit the dirt ten times—and _just_ ten times. She stopped because her balance was a little off; it ruined the pacing she was aiming for.

_Dammit._

Not thinking ahead must be genetic or something. She should've realized that running with a stump was different from walking with a stump. The latter gave her time to attain an adequate level of coordination for every step she took, thus her walking had her not swaying her hand as much as before. The former offered no such luxury. It wasn't crippling (as if she wasn't crippled enough already, haha, _fucking badum tss_ ), but it certainly damaged her rhythm, like trying to play the piano with half of the keys turned silent.

No biggie. She'd adapt. She started jogging again, being more mindful of her balance and keeping her hand glued to the front of her stomach. There was still a bit more sway from her left side than on her right, but she didn't bother doing any more corrections. This was the best she could manage for the moment, so it'd have to do.

By the time she reached what she remembered to be the one-mile mark, her stump started throbbing, a mild jolt in her senses that continued to bring pain as she continued her exercise, but she'd been through worse—heck, the worst cramps she experienced had nothing on this—so she soldiered on.

But as she was halfway to the second mile, the pain had risen exponentially, like a light pitter-patter of rain serving as a welcoming entrance to an unforgiving torrential one. She had to stop, grab her bicep, hiss in a breath.

"Fuuuuuuck," she whispered, wishing she had taken some painkillers before setting out. Her stump felt like she had been simultaneously stung by a horde of bees. Bees with infinite lives. Infinite. Fucking infinite.

What could cause this, though? She understood the ongoing presence of phantom pains for an amputee, but she never thought a simple jog would kick a bee's nest in her injury. Her Aura did wonders with closing up the amputated part and making it look like a several-months-old wound within a fraction of the time, so it couldn't be something like infection or broken stitches. Was it the sudden drop in temperature? Dawn in Patch oftentimes had thick mists sailing through its parts, forest and village alike, retaining within it the coldness of the previous night well after the moon and stars had bowed and let the curtains fall.

Maybe it _was_ the mist. It grew thicker around her despite not moving anymore, and the pain skyrocketed as well.

No more. The pain was too much. Desperate, she channeled her Aura—revving up the engines, so to speak—letting it course around her body more potently, a part of her mind dead-set on the idea that if she could absorb external damages, then she could do the same with internal. Flawed logic, the rest of her mind knew, but it might help with nullifying some of the pain at least and—

She gasped.

Her right arm was back.

"What the f—"

Yang blinked and things started to make a little more sense. Her right arm _was_ there—she wasn't seeing things—but it was a disembodied outline, glowing gold and going back-and-forth between see-through and invisible, like a broken hologram. It was fucking creepy as hell. She tried clenching her right hand and the gold ghost responded, mimicking every individual movement she ordered her fingers to do. Her breath was erratic, going in and out with abandon, each followed closely by tremors that made her even her lips quiver, as if she had been submerged in subzero temperatures. She gulped, tried to calm herself down. She wanted to know it was real, to believe she wasn't seeing an illusion, so her left hand went to touch it and like the phantom it was, her hand went through the forearm without resistance.

But the pain intensified the moment left and right touched, and she couldn't hold back a scream. She took a step back, another, and pulled her left arm away, panting.

"What the fuck? What the fuck?!"

And like how it appeared, it vanished in the same way, without fuss, without warning. The glow stayed for a second longer before vanishing as well, dissipating into nothingness like light robbed of its source. All that was left was her standing in the middle of a dirt path, panting heavily with several beads of sweat trickling down her face, and looking at her stump as if it had started talking. Maybe along the lines of, "Psyche! You're just seeing things, babe! You must be going crazy! Tough luck, babe, haha, tough _fucking_ luck."

Yang thought it'd be over, but her ears picked up a menacing growl behind her.

_A Beowolf!_

She didn't have weapons on her and her Scroll was back in her room. The growl got louder, muffling the light footsteps on the dirt. Wait, light? Beowolves were anything but light.

Looking behind her, she saw a white and brown Corgi baring its teeth. When she fully turned around, it started barking.

"Due?"

It was definitely the rambunctious dog Dad adopted back before she was born. Due dashed forward, looking like he was about to tackle her, but his direction was askew and that was deliberate. He ran past her, barking all the while, and stopped about five paces from where she stood, aiming his sudden aggressiveness to someone—orsome _thing_ —hidden beyond the thickening mist.

She knew about the mists in Patch and how sometimes they could become as thick and touchable as steam, but looking at the one before now seemed to play games with her danger senses. It was safe, it was dangerous, it was safe, it was dangerous, you see a shadow to your right, but that's just a tree, the mist eases up a little and you see the tree some more and realize it was actually a shadow, wait, no, it was a tree all along, you should definitely get your eyes checked or something—

She shook her head. She needed to focus.

"Due," she called, tapping her hand on her thigh, "come on, boy, let's get back home."

Due looked over to her, unsure, but complied after a few more taps.

She cast one final glance at the mist, felt her spine tingle. _Something_ was out there. Maybe Grimm, but… no this didn't feel like Grimm. If it was, it would've attacked by now, and the measly barks from a dog that barely reached her knees was a laughable reason for it to stay in their hiding spots. Whatever this was, it was bad news sending out bad vibes, and she was ill-equipped to face it.

Her right arm itched. Throbbed and itched, as if it were alive and there again. Her left hand went there to scratch it, but her nails ended up scraping the side of her stomach. The throbbing morphed into that all-familiar agonizing pain.

"Race you home, boy!" she said, unable to control the volume, too tense as she was with the dangers and the pain.

She had stopped her jog because the pain got too much. Well, this time, pain and fear became great motivators for a swift dash to home.

Regardless and quite unfortunately, Due won the race.

* * *

**IV**

The sound she heard was rhythmic, reaching her ears in a speed akin to a musical beat. The most basic of beats: One, two, one, two, one, two—

"Now here's where I'm supposed to say you ought to take it easy on the exercise at first…"

The rhythm should've been like that, but with a missing right fist, her left had to face the punching bag alone, bringing forth a beat that was as loud as much as it was silent. One, nothing, one, nothing, one, nothing—

"… but I guess it's a little late for that."

If Yang looked in a mirror, she would've seen a crippled woman on her last leg (more like last arm, haha, badum _fucking_ tss), meticulously beating on a punching bag with a scowl deep enough to start an onset of premature wrinkles on her forehead. Sweat clung on every inch of her body, and each breath blowing through her mouth was as rushed as it was ragged, which bring to mind the sounds an old bellows would make. Her knuckles hurt, the presence of Aura missing since the start of her punching session, because she had depleted it minutes ago and by that point, she was lost to the broken rhythm, imagining that her missing right fist occupied the silent beat with its imaginary punches to the bag.

When Dad— _Taiyang_ , her mind retorted, acting reasonable and rebellious at the same time—entered the miniature gym he and Summer had set up across the living room, she stopped her exercise for a moment, looked at him, and resumed punching the sand out of the bag.

"Is something wrong, Yang?"

She stopped punching again, panting, licking her dried lips. Tongue tasted salt. "What"—she swallowed—"makes you say that?"

"You look tense," he said, coming closer. "And your eyes are red."

"No, I don't," she said, "and my eyes are always red when I work up a sweat."

"That's not what Qrow told me."

"Did he now?"

Tai scowled, opened his mouth, but words refused to come out. He shut his mouth, took a deep breath, and tried talking again. "You still haven't answered my question, Yang. What's wrong?"

She could've kept it to herself, could've stayed quiet and continued her exercise routine with her father still trying to hear her out while lacking the resolve to ask her again, but she couldn't. This morning was excruciating; it felt like she had gone insane. That phantom arm back in the trail… she wanted to see it again, wanted to harness it. More than anything, she wanted to feel her right arm being there again, so she recalled what she felt, what she did, at that moment and replicated it, her Aura burning with the same resolve. Again and again, she failed to produce even a spark. Her whole body glowed, her hair basking fiery warmth on her back, and there was a tinge of red in her vision, but the barrier of her protective Aura ended where her stump began, never extending far beyond her existing flesh. She failed and kept failing, but she was more than determined to make it work. Unfortunately, for every failed try, the angrier she became, and the angrier she became, the more she tried to force this experiment to succeed till she came to a point where she might end up getting hospitalized again for severe Aura exhaustion. She stopped herself in time, but she hadn't even come close to regaining her lost limb.

The time afterwards was all spent dealing punishment at the punching bag, her go-to stress-reliever whenever knocking goons' heads or cracking Grimm skulls were off the table. This should've been calming, she should've been having fun (because she was, after all, a _pun_ -loving person, get it, _pun_ ishing a _pun_ ching bag, haha, _fucking badum tss_ ), but it was not to be. Pain was constant, now more on her left knuckles than on her right stump, given a beating as much as they gave one to the giant black hotdog hanging from the ceiling, especially with no Aura to protect them.

Dad's eyes locked onto her hand, and he spotted the red tinges on it almost immediately. "Are you…" He took in a breath. "You aren't even wearing protective gear!"

She forewent any sort of protection because it'd take too much time and too much work, and her anger was reaching the boiling point. She needed release right away before she ended up directing it at something she shouldn't.

Dad was beside her in a second, gently taking her hand and inspecting the damage. Two split knuckles, forefinger and middle. Her ring and pinky knuckles were as red as rashes, having taken less of the brunt from her consecutive punches, but they had in no way eluded pain, as now that her mind lost focus of its single-minded objective, the pain receptors she had been successfully ignoring were visiting her in one giant wave.

Her hand shook in her father's own, and she felt like a child again, still wet behind the ears in all things Huntsman-related and taking her first steps into becoming the unstoppable powerhouse she aspired to be. God, that seemed like two lifetimes ago, back when things were great, when things were looking up, when things were… symmetrical, for lack of a better word. Well, now she was back to square one, unable to muster a formidable challenge for any Grimm that came her way.

She felt something press below her right eye, sliding towards the side. Dad's hand hovered inches from her right, the thumb sticking out and glistening like a jewel. Her vision, she realized, was blurry, and she tried to blink it to clarity. Her left cheek felt wet and her breath felt like hitching. She knew what was happening, knew what she was failing to force back, and not even every ounce of her willpower could stop this new wave coming her way, but she tried anyway. Now more than ever, she wanted to stop it. She didn't want to look weak. She didn't want to be that fragile little girl again. She already allowed herself a moment of weakness back at the hospital. Any more than that would mean… would mean—

"Yang."

She looked at her father, the concern reflected in his eyes, and her resistance fell like a house of cards. New tears formed and flowed, cascading down her cheeks in complicated contours, as her face morphed through several expressions—nose snorting a fresh onset of phlegm, cheeks rising to help shut the eyes and their ever-flowing tears, lips trembling in place as the bottom gets pinned down like a caught animal by teeth that couldn't care less if they pierced through the skin or not. The shakes infected her whole body now.

Tai wrapped her in his big arms, buried her face to his shoulder, and didn't so much as grunt when she grabbed his shirt and the flesh behind it. She hitched her breath once, twice, and then cries started bursting out of her mouth like a steaming kettle: low from the start, but gradually got higher and higher in pitch and volume. She dropped to her knees and Dad followed, hugging her like a big bear.

After some time of crying her eyes out, she said, "It was there."

"Hmm?"

"My right arm was there. I'd seen it, felt it, like some… Aura projection." She sniffed. "But now it's gone again. Nothing but a fucking stump!"

"Yang, you're not making sense. When did this happen?"

She took a deep breath, sniffed again, wiped her eyes, and exhaled shakily with gritted teeth. "I… I was out jogging and then my arm started hurting like hell. I gave it some Aura to take away the pain, and then like magic, my right arm suddenly appeared. It shined like gold, like my Aura, but it was real, Dad. I'm not making this up!"

"Hey, hey, it's okay, Yang, it's okay." He patted her back. It wouldn't occur to her, until in hindsight, that his treatment of her as if she were a little kid was done because that was as far as he currently knew about raising a child. Though the papers designated her as a cousin, they held no sway to what Tai felt, and knowing there might well be missteps along the way, he was trying his best to be the father she needed. Hindsight, however, wouldn't be at least until she was back in her bedroom, lying down on her bed and waiting for sleep, so at that moment, his attempt at calming her was met with irritation.

"No, it's not!" she said, almost shouting. "Everything is just… _fucked_! I'm not supposed to travel back in time, but I did. I wished I didn't lose my arm from those goddamn Beowolves, but I did. And I wished I hadn't gone crazy enough to believe I got my arm back, but I—"

Her words turned muffled when Dad tightened his hug and put one hand behind her head, stroking her hair, again as if she were a child needing protection from the world. She hated it, but she didn't stop it. It was like a drug, harmful but blissful, and she didn't want it to stop.

"I believe you," Dad said, his voice racked with an emotion she knew contained worry and confusion. Her voice suffered the same symptom, after all, projecting word after word the physical and mental pain she was going through. "I believe you, Yang."

"Do you?" she asked, hoping she wasn't being patronized. "Do you really, Dad?"

"Yes." And he meant it. She detected no lie. "If the world decided to bring you here to me—to _us_ , really—then how farfetched does that make your recent experience look?"

She opened her mouth, processed that question, and let out a shaky laugh instead of words. Dad offered a smile, and she offered one back before having to sniff hard.

Dad arched an eyebrow. "Did I ever teach you to blow your nose, little lady?"

She refused to snort. It'd just make the situation with her nose worse. "Yes, you did, but I guess it didn't stick."

"We'll correct that soon." He rubbed the back of her head again. "We all got questions we want answers to, Yang, and we'll get them in time. And there's just so many surrounding _you_ specifically that I don't dare dismiss anything."

She looked to her stump, tried clenching her right fist, but while she felt a very numbed sensation, nothing happened. Her right hand remained a ghost to the naked eye. "It was real. I know it was."

"And we'll figure that out in time." He helped her stand back up, his eyes on the bruised and torn knuckles. "But right now, how about we take care of this first, then you can go freshen up and we'll all have breakfast together. You, me, and the kids."

She wondered if Dad knew the _other_ meaning to what he just said. "I'm not Mom, though."

He snorted, smiling lopsidedly. "But you have a way with kids that you might as well be one. Marriage between cousins is forbidden, though."

"Dear God, Dad, what is _wrong_ with you?" she asked, voice more of mirth than disgust.

"I just wanna hear my Sunshine laugh in the morning, is all. And when you feeling up for it later this afternoon, I'll help you out in your training regime." He paused. "You _are_ planning on getting back into the game, right? I was reading that correctly, right?"

She gave a nod, but then pursed her lips. "Yeah. And I'm really thankful for the support, Dad, but"—she gestured to her missing arm—"what's the use? I can't fight as well as I used to with this."

"Hey now, Sunshine, that's quitters talk. You can't throw in the towel before the match even begins, you know." He then grinned. "And besides, you aren't disabled as you think you are."

She blinked. "What's that supposed to mean?"

His grin got wider. "You still know how to kick, right?"


	4. Flashback

/ — — **CHAPTER 4** — — \

**Flashback**

**I**

Time marched ever forward, Yang realized, when the tree leaves started turning red and then falling, when the air got colder and colder as the weeks passed. The autumn season had come full force in the blink of an eye. Just yesterday, while doing the grocery shopping with Tai, she spotted a row of posters announcing the date of the 34th Vytal Festival, which would be held this time in Mistral. It was a month away, and remembering how big and momentous of an event the 34th had been—this was more of an impression than outright recollection, because the most vivid festival she remembered was the 36th iteration, when it was Vale's turn again to host it, and she could exactly recall the old man's special ramen stand, 6-year-old Ruby excitedly running around the parade grounds with her classmates, and the tensest finale of the tournament when the representative of Vale, Terra Clayton, won while her Aura level was one percent away from defeat (the red zone)—she had the desire to go to Mistral and personally enjoy the festivities. It was a desire that would remain unfulfilled, she knew quite well, but there was no crime in dreaming.

For today, however, dreamland would have to be on hold as reality ensues into her little world.

"It feels odd, you know," she said to Qrow as they both waved goodbye to her younger self, who was marching to another day in kindergarten.

"What is?" her uncle asked, hands in his pockets and obviously refraining from pulling out his ever-present flask and taking a swig in full view of every impressionable child enrolled in this school.

"Seeing myself to kindergarten."

"Ah."

"I've done this for the past month, and it never seems to… you know, _stop_ being weird."

"And it bothers you?"

She pursed her lips. "No, not really. It's like with my right hand. I can still feel it there, as if I'm being haunted by its ghost, and it's weird, but at the same time, it's not at all bad. Does that make sense?"

"I guess," he said, though she knew that was a lie. Qrow had trouble with sympathy, more so when it pertained to grievances he had no prior experience with, but at least he wasn't being blunt like his usual self. A white lie was still a lie, but right now, Yang felt that it was better this way.

Once Young Yang had entered the main school building, the two made their way back home. However, instead of using the usual route, which would take them about fifteen minutes to get there, they took a different path that led them deeper into the forest and drop another four hours into their travel time. This was the morning after Qrow returned from another long term mission, and this was their chance to not only catch up on what was going on with each other but Yang now had an escort for something her Dad was too busy and uninformed to do with her.

"Speaking of your arm," Qrow said, as they crossed the street and walked along one of the campus walls of Signal Academy, "Tai told me about your little episode last month."

She grunted. "What'd he say?"

"He hadn't been specific about it, so I'm hoping you could shed some light into it." He finally pulled out his flask and drank a generous amount of booze. He did so while they were passing by Signal's entrance gate, with many of its students still on their way to morning classes. Some stared, some tried to ignore him, some might even be too young or innocent and think that his flask was filled with just water or juice.

_Set an example to little kids, but throw it all out the window on teens who haven't yet reached the legal drinking age._

Shaking her head but smiling, Yang said, "I was off jogging one early morning and midway through, the phantom pain hit me hard. Thought it was a good idea to reinforce myself with Aura, so I did, and that's when my arm appeared. It wasn't all there, though; it flickered like a broken hologram. It shined like gold and it looked so real, I thought I could actually touch it."

While explaining all of this, she did her best to ignore the stares _she_ got. Specifically, at the arm that wasn't there. She knew, in the rational part of her brain, that these kids meant no malice in their staring, because it was just rare to see someone like her, someone physically unsymmetrical and broken. She did her best to keep moving forward, maintaining strength at a time she might need it now more than ever, and as the wave of incoming students dwindled and the two crossed another block towards the outskirts of Patch's main town, she released the heavy breath she'd been holding awhile.

"You okay?" Qrow asked.

Yang nodded, her smile coming out crooked no matter how much she tried to avoid it. "Kinda. I'm all for being the center of attention, but… not like this, ya know."

"Yeah." He pursed his lips, pondering over something, and then offered his flask to her. "Need a drink?"

She looked at the flask, then at her uncle with her one eyebrow raised and smile gone.

He retreated immediately. "Not the time?" He looked at his flask, shrugged, closed it, then pocketed it. "Guess not."

"Not everything can be solved with drinking, Qrow."

He opened his mouth, then instantly slammed it shut. His face contorted, his thoughts more than likely heavy, but he said nothing in return.

Their path to the forest was paved in asphalt, a small road splitting the forest and leading to the next town over, but when they reached the deep rising curve that wanted to avoid the denser parts of the forest, they stepped out of the road and onto a dirt path leading deep into that denser part. Large trees, bathed in bright orange, reached out and covered the sky, but only with _some_ success. In spring and summer, they would've done a wonderful job of simulating night in the early afternoon, but with the coming of winter and their inability to imitate their evergreen brethren, light found a way to shine in the area. In front of Yang, mini-spotlights scattered about in and out of the dirt road, and dried leaves crunched underfoot as she walked along. Her ears picked up nothing but the crispy sounds of their footsteps and the faint noises of wildlife mingling out of sight. Despite that, her and Qrow's senses were up, exercising caution all the same, because there was no telling when a Grimm would rear its ugly head as they delved deeper into the forest. Qrow even tapped his legs twice at her, a signal for synchronization. It was a small team exercise his old team started (courtesy of Summer) and passed down to her and Ruby—minimizing the frequency of noise by matching their footsteps with each other. He once told her a story about this exercise helping with detecting an Alpha Beowolf stalking them during their sophomore year, but he never went into the details all that much. She thought this exercise was useless outside of a team exercise, but regardless she decided to humor her uncle.

"About that shining arm of yours," Qrow said, not trying to be condescending but his words make it sound like he was. Yang bit back her anger. "You're sure it was real?"

She took a deep breath, nodded. "Sure as I'll ever be. Unfortunately I hadn't been able to replicate it afterwards. I know it has something to do with my Aura, but nothing works. I even tried when I have those phantom pain episodes, still nothing."

"You must be missing something, then."

She rolled her eyes. "Gee, I could've told you that weeks ago, Qrow."

"Meh."

In the small instances of silence between their synchronized footsteps, her ears picked up a twig snapping somewhere to her left. It was faint, far, and that sound alone wasn't a telltale sign of Grimm, but she readied Ember Celica anyway.

"Don't get all twitchy here," Qrow said, but one hand rested on the hilt of his sword-scythe.

"I won't. Just preparing for something."

"If you say so."

They went quiet, then, and kept on walking, listening, drowning out the rhythmic beat of crunching dried leaves that now seemed to mimic the crunching of broken glass. Yang counted forty footsteps of nothing happening, no other out-of-place sound shaking her eardrums.

"By the way," she said, her voice lower than before, "where did your last mission take you this time?"

"Atlas. Had a nice little chat with Jimmy—ah, that's James Ironwood, the General of the Tin Man Brigade."

She couldn't help snorting. "Seriously? You call General Ironwood's forces the Tin Man Brigade?"

"Hey, if the shoes fits…"

Yang shook her head, but she was sure mirth was written all over her face.

Qrow continued, "I also have a not so nice chat with the Schnee brat."

Her left hand clenched before she realized it. "Weiss?"

"Worse, her older sister, Winter."

"Oh, right. Weiss _did_ tell us about an older sister who's in the Atlesian military."

Qrow sighed, his free hand scratching his head. "Great, a future subordinate of Jimmy Tintin. First time a kid left a bruise on my shin. That brat can sure kick hard."

She snorted again. "You probably deserved it."

"Funny. She said the same thing."

"Even the 'probably'?"

He nodded.

"I sure wish I could meet her in person. And what about Weiss?"

"Hadn't talked to her. That chat with Winter was coincidence, really. But if you're referring to your teammate, then no, my contacts had not seen or heard a trace of her. The same with Ruby and Blake."

"So they're not in Atlas, then."

"Yeah. Sorry I can't dig up anything more worthwhile."

She shook her head at him. "You're doing your best, Qrow. That's what matters."

He grunted. Going to another topic, he asked her, "Still not getting a prosthetic?"

Yang sighed, looking at her stump. "Well, we've _tried_ , but even now, putting one on hurts like a bitch. Like immortal bees stinging me over and over."

"Is that normal?"

"Doctor Tushar said something about arm amputees having a longer time to adjust with prosthetics than leg amputees, but he hasn't been able to explain the pain."

"So it's not normal, then. Damn."

"It's bad, but not astronomically bad, you know. Dad's giving me the rundown on kick-based martial arts again."

"How does that help you, really?"

"Come on, Qrow, think positive! Otherwise I'll catch your negativity and go full-blown emo or something."

"You say that like it's a bad thing."

"For me, it is." She brushed her hand on her golden locks. "I heard emo kids tend to dye their hair black."

"If you say so. But still, kick-based martial arts?"

She sighed, conceding. "I've been kind of neglecting that part of my training for some years. Figured it's time to expand my repertoire, so to speak."

"With your shotgun gauntlets, I figured that was the case, too. You going to switch to shotgun greaves?"

She pursed her lips. "I… don't know. At the moment I'm just training to be as strong as I had been, but there's still some balancing issues, training my left hand to be dominant, corkscrewing during sit-ups, stuff like that."

"Don't forget your kicking exercises."

"Of course," she said, while rolling her eyes, "how can I forget that. One of these days, I'm gonna be the girl who puts the 'kick' in asskicking. Just you see."

"Uh-huh, good luck with that, Sunshine." Qrow hummed for a while, staring at the forest canopy. "You know," he said, pausing, licking his lips, breathing in, "I think I know a guy who's an expert in kick-based martial arts. Even uses shotgun greaves the last time we—well, had a friendly spar."

"Oh? Define friendly."

He sighed. "We were drunk, okay?"

"When are you not drunk, uncle?"

"Do you wanna hear about the guy or not?"

"You aren't presenting him in the most desirable light, though."

He sighed again. "Just hear me out. Anyway, this guy owes me a few favors. Hopefully it's enough to cash in for some lessons with him."

"I don't deal well with teachers who're strangers, Qrow."

"Don't worry, I'll be there with you. He might be a drinking buddy, but that don't mean I trust the guy."

"Okay."

After another ten minutes of walking— _and nothing dangerous happening_ , a part of Yang's mind lamented—they arrived at a crossroad, where it all began. Looking to their right flank, the abandoned house loomed above them. She saw the broken porch railing, recalled the danger-seeking Beowolf thought it better to go through the wood than vault over it. The phantom pains returned and she did her best to suppress the wince.

Qrow walked forward towards the intersecting path and took the hairpin turn right that led to the house, only for a few steps before stopping and… just staring at the place. Yang followed his lead, but stayed right at the middle of the crossroads, deciding to stay quiet and let her uncle have his moment. This was the house she saw in one of the hidden pictures (and probably the _only_ picture) of the Branwen siblings together and happy. They had been younger, all smiles and zero cynicism, comfortable to be close to each other, like true siblings were. This place held a lot of memories for Qrow.

 _And it's the main reason why he never went back here without a valid reason_ , she thought and realized. _One was to save me and Ruby. The other is to help me solve the mystery of my being here._

She clenched her hand, feeling like she had to say something—anything, really—but her mouth stayed shut. Qrow took one big sigh, murmuring something, and turned around, looking at the road behind her with those dull crimson eyes conveying a sense of conviction that he was done with the memories and didn't wish to revisit them anytime soon. She lost her opportunity to speak out, and huge part of her was okay with that. Her hand clenched harder.

"Well," Qrow said, walking down the slope and back to the intersection, hands in his pockets, "we're back to the scene of the crime. Shall we start?"

* * *

**II**

Yang nodded, though she couldn't be sure _where_ to start. Still, she tried and fixated on the spot she stood on.

"Okay," she said, stomping on the ground, sounding off a cacophony of crunching dried leaves. "This is where little Yang and Ruby were when I saw them."

Qrow hummed in response and walked farther away from the house, onto the crossroad, and kept on going. About five paces away from it, he stopped, grabbed his sword, and swiped it on the ground to his left like a tennis racket. An instant gust blew away the dead leaves, and amongst the yellow- and red-colored ground now lay a small spot of dark green and brown.

He said, "And this is where I found them when I got here."

It took a bit of time for her to understand what he meant, but once she did—

_Start of fall_

_Power_

_Fear_

_Desperation_

_Shoot_

_Explosion_

_Fall_

_**PAIN** _

—her hand clenched and her eyes looked away. The two sisters survived, of course, but they came away lucky. If Yang's aim hadn't gone in that trajectory, they either would've been in a Beowolf's stomach or in the morgue. Or maybe even be crippled as her. Maybe one limb, maybe both, maybe all.

She shivered, then started walking.

Yang wanted to go inside the house and look around it, but knowing that Qrow would disapprove, after that silent reminisce of simpler times earlier, she refrained from doing so and instead walked along the path to where she had come from. Just ten steps away—twice the distance Qrow covered—there was another crossroads, one straight, the other veering a little to the left and descending. Yang hadn't seen this other path at the time, too focused yet tired as she had been, but the distant memory of her own childhood journey to the abandoned house was slowly coming back to her.

Yes, she did remember climbing a small slope before coming to the crossroads that split towards a shortcut to town and the house in the picture. Clarity of memory came back like a swipe of a hand on a steamed mirror. That meant—

Yang pointed to the path going straight and forward. "I came from that way." Her pointing arm panned to the other path. "And this is where I came from, back when I was in little Yang's shoes."

"I get the feeling that's going to get a little confusing," Qrow said, heading to her right side, his sword still out and resting on his shoulder. He gestured to the straight path with his chin. "So… we goin' that way?"

"Beats staying here," she replied, and her mind flashed a few thoughts— _beats looking at tombs, beats looking at a place where you could've failed, beats having to look at the place where you got mauled_.

Her uncle's eyebrows knitted together, eyes on the ground, sighing, but he grunted a response. "I hear ya."

"Do you know where this road leads to?"

"Needle Point, about five or six miles away."

Yang knew of the place—a small village with a population of three nuclear Huntsman families—but never went there. Her lips pursed.

"Six miles doesn't sound right," she said.

"What do you mean?"

She shook her head. "I, I don't know if it was the exhaustion, but I'm pretty sure I walked _at least_ twice that distance before getting here. I hadn't encountered any village at all."

"Could be the exhaustion," he said, shrugging, "could be not, but that's why we're here, right? To figure it out?"

She sighed through her nose, looking between her uncle and the path. "Yeah. Let's get going."

They started walking without another word.

A twig snapped behind them, but neither heard it.

* * *

"Hey, you ever thought about going back to school?" Qrow asked, about a minute after silence occurred between them.

She arched an eyebrow. "What, Beacon? With how I am right now?" She shook her head, frowning. "I'll be lucky if I didn't get disqualified before the initiation. But that's not stopping me."

"The next academic year is less than six months away, though. That's a pretty tight time frame."

She knew it was, but like she said, that wasn't stopping her. If anything, it motivated her to do better. "Think I can't do it?"

"With you being this determined, I'd be stupid to think so."

A sigh passed through her lips, and she looked up towards the forest canopy, the gaps in its cover looking like holes on a shack's roof. The frown returned—this one more out of confusion than annoyance—and she blinked a few times. Something looked wrong, but she couldn't really pinpoint the what of it.

 _Must be nothing_ , she thought and returned her gaze to the front, the path looking like it was never-ending, like a perspective painting where the whole picture seemed to look like it was being sucked into the center. Needle Point seemed farther than six miles right now.

"What I'd do for a bionic arm," she said. "That'll definitely even the odds for me."

"Is that another future tech invention, like selfie cameras?"

She rolled her eyes. Leave it to the grumpy uncle to complain about what he thinks to be 'useless gimmicky things.' "It's an Atlesian invention. Real high-tech stuff for amputees. Like, you lost a limb, then you recovered that limb, except it's now all made of nuts and bolts."

"But why call it a bionic arm if it's a prosthetic?"

" _Advanced_ prosthetic, uncle. I heard Atlas dumped a shit-ton of money to fund their robotics project for years and this is just _one_ of the things they refined to almost perfection. I mean, if I had one"—she wiggled her fingers, made a peace sign, a gun sign, a fig sign, a rockstar sign—"I could do this with it. Pretty _handy_ for crippled Huntsman, you know."

A look of dawning came to his features. "So _that's_ what they've been cooking up back there. I've seen Jimmy with that bionic arm thing, actually."

"Really? Odd. I was sure it hadn't been invented until, like, five years from now."

"Military property, I'd wager. Like you said, those Atlesians pour insane amounts of funding on several Tin Man projects. Hell, I even heard rumors of a scientist trying to convince the council that he can build a robot that would look, sound, and feel human." He arched an eyebrow at her.

Getting the meaning, she shook her head. "No robots looking like humans where I'm from." The latest robot model Atlas was shipping still looked more metal than a rock band and was as expressive as an actual rock. Well, at least their AI programming wasn't rocky ( _badum tss_ , hehe).

"I guess it didn't fall through," Qrow said. "Speaking of future stuff, you wouldn't happen to remember lottery numbers, would you?"

She sighed, rolled her eyes. "Funny how you and Dad think alike sometimes."

"No shit. Tai actually asked you that?"

" _In jest_ ," Yang retorted, emphasizing her words while cocking one eyebrow and lopsidedly smiling. "I'm not so sure about you, though."

"Hey, whatever pays the bills."

"Right," she drawled. "And no. Seriously, why would I bother with remembering lottery numbers? That'd mean I actually _expected_ to return to the past or something."

"Yeah, yeah, I hear—"

He stopped abruptly. Not knowing the cause, Yang stopped as well and asked him what was wrong.

His eyes darted about, blinking profusely, and she half-remembered a similar face he made after she kicked him awake when he was sleeping on the foyer, smelling like he'd been swimming in a pool of alcohol. He had even the audacity to leave the front door wide open, letting the cold of winter creep in and around the foyer like air desperate to occupy a vacuum. In the here and now, his relaxed stance disappeared. His gaze, once out of focus, was now in the midst of searching for a threat. He shrugged his sword off his shoulder and revved up the gears. He looked at her right in the eyes, crimson to lilac, and then a grimace formed.

"Ready yourself, kiddo," he said. "I don't remember there being a mist here."

Her eyes widened. Her phantom arm started itching.

Ice cold air flowed around her, and the memory of that cold foyer with the opened door flashed by her again, more vivid than the last. The appearance of the mist came without warning, instantly switching clarity with obscurity, and bearable cold with glacial temperatures that'd leave a normal person freezing up on the spot in seconds. There was no interval in the mist's appearance, no gradual formation of gray enveloping the red; it was all instant, all in the literal blink of an eye—before blink, everything was red and clear; after blink, everything was gray and cold and murky, like watching a show with poor transitioning.

_This ain't no Gilligan Cut._

Confusion was at the forefront of her thoughts. It was a natural reaction, but as a Huntress-in-training, that moment of confusion could be the difference between dying and staying alive, so another blink was all she warranted her confusion before instincts took over and had her taking a defensive stance. Instincts, however, lacked some thought, because missing one arm for a stance meant for two was akin to prepping up a gun while out of bullets.

She adjusted her stance, more closed off, and she felt like a hot-blooded cartoon character just seconds away from swinging her arm to the front, palm out, and declaring something outrageous with a loud voice. Her fist clenched. The joints popped.

"Stick close," Qrow said, slowly sliding till his shoulder bumped with hers, their gazes on opposite sides of the dirt road.

"Any idea what this is?"

"Nope. Can't see shit past three feet from myself. This mist is unnaturally thick."

Other than having her vision limited by this mist, her right arm started stinging again, a slow buildup of tiny little pinpricks akin to the feeling of having a tourniquet removed.

 _Except the pain and the pinpricks are all in your head, because there's nothing there, nothing but phantoms_ , she thought, doing her best to ignore the nuisance. _Whoever said ghosts can't hurt you is full of utter shit._

"Could it be Grimm?" she asked, but somehow she already knew the answer to that.

"Nope," Qrow said, voicing her thought. "I don't think this is their handiwork. But—"

A chill slithering up her spine. Senses sharpening as the signs of danger closed in.

Qrow jumped high, while she stayed on the ground, grinning, Ember Celica loaded with Dust rounds and hungry for a beatdown. Three Beowolves, their growls muffled by the thick mist, came into view. All were pouncing for a swift kill, so all weren't expecting an immediate counterattack. Qrow used the blunt of his sword to deliver a downward slash on the highest Grimm, sending it down and dropping on top of its brethren. Both hit the ground with a loud thud and an intense scattering of dried leaves. Like a ball, the force of the blow bounced them back up high enough to reach Yang's chest level, dazed, stuck together, and very, _very_ vulnerable. She took the opportunity. She dashed straight to them, her arm cocked back, and let strength, power, and Dust rounds do the rest, sending the Grimm duo towards the third Beowolf, which was still in mid-air and had pounced a second after the first two, and all three disappeared into the mist. The only result of their exit was the satisfying crack of a falling tree.

"They sure know how to take advantage of it," Qrow continued, landing next to Yang and revving his sword again.

She snorted, pumped a new round into her gauntlet, and returned to their back-to-back positions. "Yeah, but they picked the wrong people to attack."

He eyed her through the corner of his eye. "Sure you're up for this?"

"Does it look like we have a choice?"

He grunted. "Point. Sunshine, two at your nine o'clock!"

She turned to that direction, expecting a pair of silhouettes shooting through the gray. They came in full speed at her, red eyes glowing, with one going high, the other low. "Going high!" she said to Qrow before dashing towards them, unmindful of her uncle's fading warning. She leaped high and dropkicked the top Beowolf and then fired a Dust round at the bottom Beowolf's head, point blank. The momentum carried her higher, cold air whipping around her face, her hair, and looking up at the peak of her ascension, she saw the coming-noon sky, grayed out and murky despite how thin the mist's presence was here, an almost-escape that felt like reaching the other end of a dark tunnel. She blinked, instinctively pumping another round into her gauntlet, and gravity started pulling her back down, into the mist, into the dark tunnel once more. At her descent, another Beowolf pounced from her right flank. The attack was too sudden and out of her reach, so she opted for dodging it, swerving her body mid-air to escape the sharp claws, her hand grabbing her long hair in a protective hold next to her chest.

She landed feet first, going down on one knee and pushing out a lungful of breath. She scanned her surroundings—not much help, what with the mist and all—and realized she was alone.

"Qrow!" she shouted, the judgment between sticking together and not draw attention to yourself going in full favor with the former. Rationality would argue that making noise would draw Grimm almost as effectively as the negative emotions cradled in her heart, and with how unfit she was at the moment for a group battle, she had to play it safe. On the other hand, getting separated from Qrow—the only one who could handle multiple engagements in these conditions—was a bad omen. Vulnerable and alone, a stroke of fear had helped with her judgment. "Qrow, where are you?!"

A growl from her flank. She swerved, left leg rising, heel impacting with the jaw of an Alpha Beowolf, which took the blow like the foam bullet of a nerf gun. Its golden eyes honed in on her widening lilacs, and her heartbeat sprang up. There was no room or time to dodge; the Grimm's claws were already upon her. She flared up her Aura, instincts and muscle memory already preparing for a fall recovery, but the sudden release included dire consequences. Her right arm delivered an onslaught of pain, as if it were being chewed off again.

Yang screamed, if only for half of a second before the Grimm's attack sent her flying off the path and towards the trees. Her shoulder hit one trunk, and she still kept flying, bark exploding. Her right shin hit another, kept flying. Her back hit a wider tree, and there she stopped and dropped to the ground, head hitting a root. She only had time to think, _What happened to my—_ , before the Alpha tore its way through the woods and towards its now defenseless prey. Yang sat up, both knees kissing her chest, and dodged to her left just as the Alpha went for a pounce. Bark and dirt flew about like water droplets after a splat. She rolled to her feet, her teeth gritting as her insides continued to send pain as if they were on fire. It hurt to move, it hurt to think, but she was no stranger to pain.

No stranger at all.

The Alpha was regaining its bearings after slamming headfirst into a tree, but that gave her four or five seconds at best to catch her breath and take stock of her odds. It did not at all look good for her, now more than ever, what with her Aura going haywire again. Like that one time when her right arm returned…

The Alpha Grimm's eyes found her in an instant, the rage within left her feeling a chill crawl up her spine, and she no longer had time to venture through that thought. The essentials were there, though. Ideas, fragmented like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, were connecting together to form a newer, more concrete idea. She could do it; it was now or never. She could do it. It was enough. Maybe. But… but, but, but, _but—_

Was it safe? No time to think that.

Would it work? No time.

What if it didn't work? No time.

Could she survive? No time.

What about Qrow? No time.

Would her right arm come back?

…

The Alpha dashed towards her, and she flared up her Aura once more.

* * *

**III**

A wide range of colors burst into sight, random and without form, like the psychedelic circle in your vision after staring at the sun for too long. It came in a blink, and what followed it was insurmountable pain. It worked its way from her stump towards her shoulder, towards her neck, towards her cheeks, towards her eyes. The roar of the approaching Beowolf was still there, loud and unwavering, and though in her state a part of her understood that she shouldn't be moving because of the pain, she thrusted her right arm forward, hand clenched into a fist, empowered with every bit of kinetic force her protective Aura had accumulated.

She felt something touch her knuckles (her _right knuckles_!). It was hard as rock, but it cracked like an eggshell. Amidst the rushings of the wind, the crackle of the earth, the mass swaying and crunching of dead leaves, and the dwindling roar of a would-be predator, that cracking—sounding so much like fragile eggshells—was the most prominent sound that came to her ears.

She blinked once—as ineffective as that was, what with her eyes still seeming to be looking inside a murky kaleidoscope—and through the pain, she managed a bloodthirsty grin. And then something hit her in the left shoulder. She was off the ground again, oncoming trees providing a second round of indirect abuse to her head and torso. Compared to her currently sizzling nerves, her pinball imitation against the trees felt like lovetaps. The colors in her vision did not go away; her vision was shot and she could not control her eventual descent.

Soft dirt, covered in dried leaves, became her cushion. A rough cushion, perhaps, as she continued skidding and tumbling upon it like a runaway basketball. Her momentum ended eventually, stopping with her belly kissing the ground and a plethora of aches all over her body sauntered to the forefront like scavengers after the departure of the big hunter.

Yang blinked a couple of times, at first unsure of where she was or what was going on, just that she was in pain and really, really tired.

It hurt to move, now more than ever before, but Yang did her best to get her feet under her. She tried to push her torso up with her right arm, belatedly realizing about the stump. She crashed to the ground, any and all progress made crashing with her.

_You'd think losing it a month ago would hammer in that fact by now._

But then what the hell did she feel earlier? Did she just imagine her arm returning as a shining light of badassery because she was so desperate for it?

She gritted her teeth and started again. Eyesight began to return to her in intervals—blurring colors of red and brown that looked like her fingerpainting masterpiece she made at two years old, then it began to soften and clarify almost as if she were looking into a camera finding focus. She ignored the pain and ignored the tears trickling down her dirty cheeks. She leveraged her torso up with her left arm this time, succeeding as far as sitting between her calves. The breath came out of her shakily. She sat in the middle of a small clearing about the size of her room, lower in level, with tree roots jutting out around her like prison bars bent outwards.

She looked left, right, finding nothing but mossy roots, dirt, leaves, and the cold mist as company. She raised her right arm up, glaring coldly at the missing half whose phantom continued to haunt her. Pain still pulsed through it, taunting her and her blind faith.

_Dammit all. Fuck, fuck, FUCK!_

Left hand on the ground between her knees, she pushed herself up, teeth grinding in her closed mouth, her breath coming in and out of her nose very audibly. It took just two blinks for her to realize that mud, twigs, and leaves had clung to her precious hair, and she no longer bothered to keep her mouth closed as she ground her teeth harder, no longer even cared that her exhalation morphed into a very dangerous-sounding growl.

Her rise was short-lived, too tired out already. Her bum hit dirt again, and the growl came out of her mouth more shaken than before. She bowed her head down, clenched her fist, and punched the ground. Her Aura did not protect her knuckles. She tried standing one more time, lifting her right knee till the sole of her boot touched soft soil.

It almost seemed useless to keep resisting, though. Who was she kidding, anyway? Despite having only one arm, she believed herself to be capable of handling herself against a threat, uncaring of the many disadvantages—obvious and subtle—the amputation had left her in. She still had her left fist; she could still deliver a mean left hook if she wanted. She was unstoppable—no, she _had been_ unstoppable. That word was reserved only to the Yang who was whole, to the Yang who could do anything and everything. And to make matters worse, something was going on with her Aura, unable to help her in this crisis. Crippled times two or something like it. Pain was constant, and there was a building ache at the back of her head as if someone were slowly drilling a hole to her brain there.

She felt, more than heard, the approach of the predator in the woods, its pack following closely behind. Their overbearing presence was akin to a—as begrudging as Yang felt about the comparison despite the pun—sheep sensing the hungry gaze of the stalking wolf. That said something about their power over her now—and her growing fear, no matter how much she'd want to deny it—when the cacophony of heavy footsteps crunched the dried and stiff leaves underfoot was as loud as popping fireworks. In the small clearing she had been unceremoniously thrown into, the Beowolves formed a circle around her, all of them growling and scowling, and her mind had remaining energy to wonder if they were either mad because she had done in a few of their packmates… or because they were just perpetually mad.

And there standing right in front of her was the Alpha, the big bad wolf whose skull she thought she crushed like an eggshell. The Grimm didn't even look damaged. She clenched her right hand, but of course, it was a fucking phantom sensation, an evil reminder of what she lost and could never regain.

The Alpha took its time moving towards her, and Yang calculated her odds of escaping this tightly closed encirclement. Each pair of red eyes watched her, unblinking, and she could swear the glint in them were like they were gloating their victory at her. Like they wanted her to try and escape, like they much preferred a running target.

_**You can run, but you'll only die tired.** _

Damn mind quote. She wished it didn't hammer the fact home. Or didn't make it seem like these were the unspoken words of the approaching Alpha. She looked at her left and right, making do with the corners of her eyes as she kept her head looking forward. No openings she could see. It seemed almost odd to consider that such mindless killing machines could be coordinated enough to box her in efficiently. Maybe it was because they were wolves? Well, the only way out would probably be up, but even that had its own claim to perilous danger. She could do it, too, even with just one gauntlet. It was doable. But pain was spreading everywhere, as if she were being slowly burned alive. Her nerves sounded off like a choir entering the climax of a song.

_Stop being a pussy and fucking_ _**MOVE!** _

With a scream clamped inside her throat, Yang fought the pain head-on and pumped a new round into her gauntlet. The Alpha quickened its approach, hovering atop her in a second and grabbing ahold of her arm before she could plunge it to the ground. Its grip was tight, and it felt like it intended to squeeze her bones.

A new wave of fear overcame her. All her mind could see now was a possible future, where on one side, an arm was absent, and on the other, an arm forever broken and defiled. Fear called for desperation. Fear demanded immediate action no matter the consequences. Fear did not, would not, let her go.

Neither would the Alpha as Yang tried to pull back, and when the Alpha's grip refused to budge, she started kicking. Her sitting position did little in providing… well, a _kick_ to her kick, but she didn't care. She refused to have the Grimm take away anything from her again. All the while, the Alpha's grip got tighter. There was this incessant noise coming from somewhere, like a banshee's wail she remembered hearing from an old horror movie. A banshee's cry that came more out of pure fear than overwhelming sadness. The noise resonated in her ears as she pulled and kicked, pulled and kicked, new tears streaming down her muddy cheeks.

The Alpha looked at her with its giant golden eyes, and she saw joy in them. She saw fucking _joy_ in those eyes, but fear made her ignore her anger. It was deeply rooted in her, she was realizing in some small part of her. Every action she took now was done out of a desperate desire to get away from the source of the fear.

_Those teeth—_

_The pain—_

_The claws as they rip and tear, rip and tear—_

Its grip got tighter again, and she screamed "NO!" with all her might, over and over. She could feel the bones in her arm being slowly crushed.

But then a deafening sound of thunder reverberated in the clearing. It made the Grimm close their ears and their eyes for but a moment.

For Qrow Branwen, that was more than enough for his needs.

Yang watched her uncle cleave through the pack with a grace and speed she could only compare to Ruby, but more refined, more efficient. Stronger.

_Deadlier._

If Ruby could be slashing through the next target within the blink of an eye, then Qrow blurred the moments inside one blink that you'd never know if he had gone through two, three or four Grimm while your eyes were closed.

The surrounding Beowolves dropped to the ground in pieces, the look in their eyes conveying a feeling (if Grimm could even feel) of bewilderment, as if wanting to ask, "What the hell just happened?" before their bodies began decomposing instantly into the void.

Qrow's mow-down was as fast as it was brutal, and Yang only had maybe a second or two to see what was happening before it was all over and she was on her back, with a severed Beowolf arm still clinging to her own. She blinked, hearing the rising roar of the Alpha, the sound of it so guttural that the phantom pain coming from her stump cried as if it were sympathizing with the loss.

She saw the Alpha turn away, growling, teeth grinding against each other as its whole body shook in rage, but it just had time to move halfway before Qrow swiped his blade across its neck. The growl stopped abruptly, and Yang watched the Alpha's head shoot out of its body. She'd seen more than a few Grimm fall with their heads chopped off, and though it was gruesome to look at the first few times, never were they as messy as this one. Black ichor burst out of the hole in its neck, almost propelling the severed head even higher, and her mind reached into a small, old memory of her and her elementary school friends launching a water rocket. The Grimm's body shook as if it were having a seizure, went on its knees, and dropped to the ground, dead.

Yang lay there, breathing in and out, tired on so many levels she was amazed she hadn't been pulled into the sweet lull of sleep yet. No more growls filled her ears, no more red eyes flooded her vision, but one blink later she was staring at glowing red eyes once more and she felt like screaming—

"Yang," Qrow said, closing his eyes as he took a deep breath. When he opened them again, his eyes lost the odd glow. "You all right?"

No, she still felt like screaming. Out of fear, out of anger, out of fuck-reasons-I-just-wanna-scream, she wasn't sure which one held top spot, but her mouth articulated no more than a slow release of the breath she'd been holding for something louder, and she closed her eyes in pure relief.

"I'll take that as a yes," Qrow said, and when Yang opened her eyes again, her uncle was looking around for any looming threat, but the action, she knew, was done more out of instinct than rationality. The mist was still around them, cold, thick, and ominous. Feeling that the coast was clear, he put one hand on her back and the other grabbed her left bicep. "Can you stand?"

She had one second to provide a response before Qrow forcibly yanked her up till she was standing and wrapped her left arm over his shoulder. Something akin to vertigo hit her senses. Her vision blurred, drained of color, and her breath hitched, now becoming hard to breathe. Qrow noticed right away, because she saw the colorless blob she knew to be her uncle was moving his mouth (or at least where she thought his mouth was), saying something to her, maybe asking a question, but she couldn't make sense of the words, as if her uncle were speaking in gibberish. She wanted to sleep so badly.

She shook her head, which brought a pin-sized stab within her brain. _The immortal bees got inside_ , she thought, unsure where exactly that came from. Her legs gave out, and Qrow put more strength into carrying her. He said more gibberish in her ears. Did she respond? She didn't know. Everywhere had hurt.

Had.

The relief was all-consuming, and if she could smile, she would've done so. She could no longer move her body, as if every part of it was weighed down in lead, but that was a small nuisance to what was more important. The pain was gone now. All gone. Sweet, sweet relief.

Her eyes closed for a moment. She needed to rest them. A part of her felt that things were not yet over and that she needed to fight the drowsiness. But she needed rest more than anything. She'd just rest her eyes for a second. Just for a second. Just… for a…


	5. Residual

/ — — **CHAPTER 5** — — \

  **Residual**

**I**

Taiyang found Qrow in the living room, a large brown bottle in his hand, half of its content most likely churning inside the drunkard’s stomach already. The label on the bottle looked familiar.

“Did you raid my stash?”

Qrow, whose attention had been on the news anchor professionally announcing the improvements Atlas and Mistral are doing for the upcoming Vytal Festival Tournament, blinked and then looked at him with bloodshot eyes. He showed no frown, no smirk, no emotion. Just a flat stare that was downright unnerving to look at.

And then Qrow took a swig from the bottle, rotating it a little so he could better see the label, while the drink and drunk kissed without interruption.

He resisted his eyes from twitching. He refused to give his teammate the satisfaction. “You did raid my stash,” he said, walking into the living room and sitting down next to Qrow on the couch. Both of them were silent for a while, him not sure what else to say, Qrow too busy feeling the liquid fire in his stomach to bother with any sort of response that’s purely verbal.

Tai tried to listen to the news. The various clips of the tournament arena and the many battles brought to its floor flashed through the screen in rapid succession, like a video set to super fast-forward, before slowing onto an arena that suffered a brutish beating and then an arena occupied by dozens of Atlesian and Mistrali workers as the news anchor went on talking about something or other. Tai didn’t really give a damn at the moment. The news’s visual imagery more than compensated for the words that fell on deaf ears. And at the moment, his thoughts kept returning to a teen daughter he had not (yet) seen grow up and the state she was in when he came rushing back home after Qrow texted him a summary of what happened. A very brief and omission-heavy summary.

He saw her in bed, none the worse for wear, until he went about cleaning her muddied self up. Qrow didn’t bother being thorough with her unconscious form. A change of clothes and that was it. Twigs and dried-up mud in her hair, various scrapes scattered all over her, as well as some slowly forming bruises. Yang had taken quite a beating, but she was alive. Thank God she was alive.

It was almost surreal to care so deeply about someone just a month after meeting for the first time in that hospital room. Surreal in the sense that, if you ignore the time travel shenanigan, Yang would be like a child he helped conceive in his pre-adolescent years. Surreal in the sense that there was barely any awkwardness between them after the first week, about a day after her failed jog and subsequent emotional breakdown.

Well… the lack of awkwardness wasn’t entirely true. Raven really bloomed in Yang’s features, and the few times she got angry, her eyes alight in red that for a moment, he thought he was gazing into his old lover’s eyes. He did his best to control his reactions. Qrow had probably felt the same. It'd explain why he left her in such a state, but just because Tai understood didn’t mean it excused him from what he did. Or what he did halfheartedly.

He closed his eyes, took one deep breath. Focus on the events and leave the neglect lecture for later.

“What happened out there, Qrow?” he asked, trying to bury the memories of a woman he thought would stay deep and hidden in his head. It was easy to do; he had practice. Plenty of it.

Qrow replied with nothing. His eyes gazed straight at the holovision, unblinking, but Tai knew he was looking without really seeing. He reached for his Scroll and tapped it a few times to deactivate the holovision, cutting off the news anchor’s wrap-up spiel mid-sentence.

“Qrow—”

The drunkard put one hand up, inches away from Tai’s face, and then took one more swig from the whiskey, cleaning it of spirit. He set it down loudly on the coffee table with his head bowed down and a sigh that sounded equal parts dread and relief.

Tai waited for his friend to get his thoughts together. The signs were piling up. His half-hearted cleanup of Yang, raiding his secret stash of alcohol (okay, maybe, he would’ve done that at some point anyway), the look in his eyes that tell of a soul lost inside his own prison of memories. Tai had seen Qrow acting like this before. Sometimes it even felt like he was staring into a mirror, when Raven disappeared for reasons only she was privy to, when Summer disappeared yet found evidence portray a common Huntress’s demise. It always seemed like Qrow was on the verge of shutting down, almost mimicking the way he had been when news about Summer arrived at his doorstep, but he pushed on regardless, never letting despair get the better of him.

Unlike Qrow’s weak and cowardly best friend and teammate.

“That place is cursed,” Qrow said, shutting his eyes, thinning his lips. He started popping his knuckles with his thumbs one by one. Pop went the forefingers. Pop went the middle fingers. “Fucking cursed, Tai.”

It was then Tai began to notice how really haggard his old friend looked. Emphasis on _old_ , because Qrow appeared to have aged a decade since he saw last him this morning before setting off to Signal Academy. His skin was paler than normal, so much so that it made the bags under his eyes more prominent and deeper. Some bits of mud clung to the tips of his dark gray hair, and other bits smeared themselves at different spots on his usually immaculate clothing. Tai blinked twice, now also noticing that Qrow was without his red cape. More than any other abnormality on his present state, that particular tidbit stuck out like the CCT tower in Beacon Academy.

“Qrow,” he said, swallowing, “where’s your cape?”

Qrow inhaled deeply, then exhaled out the air with a growl. His hands clenched. “The fire took it.”

“Fire?”

“You have to see it to believe it, Tai. That place is just not right.”

Tai caught himself before he could raise his voice at him. Teaching stubborn kids to be Huntsman helped hone his temperament. Qrow wasn’t a kid, but he was avoiding a talk like one. Usually in the case with the kids, he would be backed up by the student councilor, but again, Qrow was no kid, and much less vulnerable to the easy going Aura the councilor naturally generated, something to help the kids be at ease and more loose with their lips.

In this situation, he was going to have to do things the common way.

“Focus, man,” he said, touching his shoulder gently, but even then, Qrow was on the verge of jumping out of his seat. His friend blinked a few times, somehow getting lost again inside his own head. “Start from the beginning. Tell me what happened.”

* * *

  **II**

“Grimm got to us a short distance from that old place.”

Tai knew right away what he meant by ‘that old place.’ It was—and pardon the pun—a **place** h **old** er name for the Branwen twin’s old home. The name sparked memories of their younger years, some bad, maybe even some good, but the general agreement between Raven and Qrow was to never mention the name at all if they can help it. Tai only managed to learn of the house’s name by accident back when he and Raven had lived there together while she was pregnant with Yang. Qrow had cut off all ties with the house, and the one time he did come back, after hundreds of times urging him to at least make a short-time visit to meet his newborn niece, it was the night Raven disappeared.

 _That place is cursed_ , Qrow had said.

If it was only Qrow who said it, Tai would've chucked it up to bad memories from a bad childhood—and in this aspect, he had no doubts whatsoever that it was bad with a capital B, A, and D—but he remembered an almost forgotten memory of him and Raven inside that house.

It was night, he and Raven were sound asleep, and Yang was two months away from being born. A loud scream jolted him out of sleep and he opened his eyes to the sight of Raven punching her own stomach. He lay on the bed, just staring at something he never thought he'd ever see, but after the second or third strike to the stomach—now realizing the presence of the baby—he sprung up and immediately took hold of her wrists. He was shouting alongside her now. He could no longer remember what he had said, but as Raven's psychotic fit subsided, he could remember his lover's murmurs, voice said with a tone of regret, of sadness, of anger, and of surrender, varying for every iteration as if she were saying a mantra.

_“This place is cursed.”_

She had gone to sleep right afterwards and come the morning, after a tense questioning, she vehemently denied she had done anything to harm their child last night. And when he asked why she thought the house was cursed, she turned tight-lipped, unable to give him an answer that would at least explain her strange behavior.

But then again, strangeness was a trait Raven always had. It was what lured him into her life in the first place. There were ups and downs, he knew before he took the plunge, and he accepted her without fail. He thought that would’ve been enough for a happy ending, growing old together—

Tai closed his eyes, forced the memories into the back of his mind, and then opened his eyes again, concentrating on the present.

“Yang and I fought them off,” Qrow continued, “despite limited visibility.” Here, he sighed and leaned his back on the couch, which groaned loudly, as if it were articulating more of what Qrow felt than the man himself. “Then everything went FUBAR when the mist separated us. She just… propelled herself into the air and never went back down.”

“Then how’d you find her?” Tai asked.

“Blind luck and a little help from a ghost.”

“What?”

Qrow shrugged. “Best way I can put it. It sure as hell haunted _me._ ”

Tai mentally counted to three—then extending it to five—before replying, “I’m going to need some context.”

Qrow opened his mouth, the look in his sunken crimson eyes seeming to say the words for him: _It’s your fault for not letting me tell the story from beginning to end._ But he shut his mouth before he could make a sound and then moved his eyes towards the deactivated holovision. He pursed his lips, swallowed a mouthful of saliva, and instead said, “Fine. Shortly after we were separated, I mowed down more of the Beowolves. I thought it was a small pack, but I’m sure I counted _at least_ twenty kills and there was plenty more beyond the mist. Maybe hundreds of ‘em.”

“That’s—”

“Impossible, I know. If a high population of Grimm were in Patch, especially near civilization, then all Huntsmen would’ve been informed. I’m not drunk enough to embellish the story, Tai.”

That was true. His voice was clear, if a little gruff, and although his eyes spoke of a man dead on his feet, there was a certain kind of clarity in them that continuously tries to break through the haze of exhaustion and memories playing (and probably replaying) inside his head. Memories, Tai was sure, that had left scars and in the process of reawakening them, the scars would eventually start to bleed again.

One particular scar must already be leaking like a flood, because Qrow smiled strangely, something that looked like a lopsided smirk—the sort he’d often display whenever his battle lust reared its ugly head—but somehow crooked. Tai was on the verge of telling his friend to stop; it was incredibly unnerving, more so than usual.

“I wish I was, though,” Qrow said, putting one hand to his face, blocking Tai’s view of the crooked smirk (much to his relief). “At least _that_ sounds more sane than what actually happened.”

He kept silent, hoping that was enough of a cue for Qrow to just get on with it already.

“Since I haven’t seen Yang in who-knows-how-long, I decided to focus on finding her.”

“You ran?”

Qrow exhaled through his nose, like a bull. “Tactical regrouping. Don’t confuse ‘em, asshole.”

He put his hands up. In any other time, he’d continue egging his old friend on, maybe reminisce of other instances in their time as the complete Team STRQ where Qrow went backward instead of forward, but Tai wanted their focus to be on the recent past, not ancient history. “Right, right,” he said, hoping his calm would carry over to Qrow, who just kept on glaring. On the bright side, he was somewhat placated for the time being. When Tai put his hands down, he asked “Then?”

“I dashed through the dirt path, killing Grimm along the way,” he said, moving his eyes back to the front but what they see wasn’t the living room’s old, fading beige wallpaper. “Yang was nowhere in sight, but I kept searching. And now here’s where things start getting really odd, Tai.

“I was sure— _utterly_ _sure_ —that I dashed in the direction _away_ from that old place, but guess where I found myself at. It looked more broken and crooked than I remembered, you know. And… I don’t know what came over me, but I just stood there, in that crossroad at the bottom of the slope, just looking at it. Trying to swallow every bit of detail. I don’t know why. Then I asked myself, ‘How the fuck is that going to help me find Yang? The clock is ticking.’ I sure as hell have no idea. But it’s like my relationship with alcohol. Sometimes I don’t want to, sometimes I want to stop for tonight, but there I go downing another dozen shots.”

 _But instead here you were downing precious seconds_ , Tai thought, nodding along, as if to say he understood but it was a meaningless gesture, all the same. Qrow’s attention was on memories not reality.

“It sounds stupid now, in hindsight,” Qrow continued, repeating his nervous tic of popping knuckles with his thumbs, “but in that moment, I thought”—he paused, shook his head—“ _believed_ that Yang went inside that house.” Here, he sighed through gritted teeth, a rumble in his throat making the sigh sound more like a growl. Maybe it was, for all Tai knew. Repressed anger, hidden regret, there were layers upon layers of that piled inside Qrow. Some he decided to share with his team, some he thought to keep private, although most of them were already known by Raven, who deflected any inquiry that came her way, even when questions had come from her boyfriend.

The one thing Tai was certain of was that Qrow vowed to never set foot inside the house again. Never again. Broken so that he could come by and see his niece, only to make that vow once more after Raven left on that very same night.

He stared at the transparent holovision screen some more and then put his hands on his face, muttering about needing some more whiskey. The story was put on hold for a bit as Tai went to his stash and procured another bottle of booze. When he was about to close the compartment, he paused, contemplated about this new thought for a second, and took one more bottle from his stash.

One opened, half-empty bottle later, Qrow stared at the sliding ice cubes at the bottom of his glass.

“I hesitated going there,” Qrow said. “I wondered to myself if I’m actually going to break my vow for Yang again. Then I said, ‘Screw it,’ and bit the bullet.”

He swallowed.

“Raven was there. She was waiting for me.”

* * *

  **III**

He stood with his weapon down at the base of the hill, staring up towards the house that gave him equal parts horror and melancholy.

 _Usher_ , his granddad called the place, a name that was supposed to hold a kind of grand significance to the Branwen family, but for as long as Qrow lived, the Branwen name and the Usher House itself were nothing more than words tossed around inside his granddad’s mental echo chamber. He and Raven were just unfortunately the ones forced to listen as the echoes slip through the chamber’s several cracks, and these cracks were widening every year, as if in proportion to the gradual loss of granddad’s sanity.

He couldn’t say without doubt that living in the same roof as his grandfather was a nightmare given form—and how odd that if other kids were to say the same, they’d automatically be considered exaggerations stemming from a mind that had not yet seen just how shitty the world can be—but it was bad, _of that_ there was very little doubt. There were more than a few memories he considered to be deep scars that refused to heal, just covered in a thin layer of skin to make it seem like it was.

It was those same memories that made him decide to turn his back on his childhood home completely.

_Home?_

Did he consider that place home?

Once. Maybe. Not anymore.

So why was he still staring at the place? Why focus on something inconsequential when his niece was out there, crowded in the fog by enemies she couldn’t see? Qrow couldn’t find an answer to that, but something within him was telling him to watch, to observe the destroyed roof, the busted down door, the rotting remnants of the porch railing, the glassless windows that seemed to stare back at him like the house had become alive and observing _him_ in turn.

The grip on his sword tightened. He thought about moving on; there was nothing of note here, after all. But the compulsion in him was strong—eerily so, as if there were unfinished business he still had with the now crooked house. He thought about moving on, he really did, but instead of looking for Yang in the forest, his steps—slow and hesitant—took him closer to the house he had sworn twice to never set foot in again.

Eight steps on the dirt marked his slow ascent, but as the Usher House came clearer into view, Qrow could've sworn he saw something moving within its walls, almost unseen like a shadow. His first thought was Yang and his pace quickened, but when his mind had a moment more to process the thought, it immediately changed to more Grimm. His childhood home had become nothing more than a festering ground for malevolent creatures, as if the Grimm not only feed on human emotions but the residual of human emotions as well.

He had plenty of reasons to swear to never come back.

 _And yet here I am_ , he thought. _The prodigal son has returned._

The floorboards screamed in anguish as he walked through the porch and stood just outside the doorless entrance. He scanned the interior, or at least tried to. The ever-present mist was unhindered in its spread. What barriers that could've stopped it from sweeping inside the house were either missing or broken. And the pervading shadows within made it all the more difficult for Qrow to be sure he wouldn't be ambushed. He could rely on his ears, but the mist messed with both visual and audio cues. If there were Beowolves crouching behind the old couch across the fireplace, growling in restrained anticipation, then he wouldn't be hearing it from where he stood.

 _I could still turn back_ , Qrow thought. _That shadow must've been my imagination. A trick of the mist maybe. I was too far to be sure of anything. I can still step back. Yang isn't here. She's top priority._ His eyes narrowed. _So move the fuck back, dammit! What are you waiting for?_

A Grimm attack. Everything had gone quiet. The constant, quiet _eeeeeeee_ of tinnitus buzzed in his ears. He could also hear his own heartbeat, could feel the rhythmic flow of blood pulsing into his head, could feel _and_ hear the swallowing of his own spit.

The floorboards creaked once more. It came from behind him.

He whirled around him, brandishing his sword, done more out of instinct than calculated thinking. The blade cut air and nothing else. Because air was all that was behind him. His eyes scoured the porch, left and right, top and—finally—bottom, where his feet continued applying pressure and consternation to the old, rotting wood as it bellowed another groan.

 _It's nothing,_ his rational mind said, wanting nothing more than to leave this incident behind him and regain focus on the main task. But which was that? The outside or the old place?

"There's nothing," he said out loud. And then swallowed his saliva. "Nothing at all here, now get out already, Qrow."

"Talking to yourself is the first sign of crazy, you know."

_That voice—_

He turned back to the darkness of the house, and there it was. The shadow he saw moving within, more visible and discernible now than he had last seen it. Human in shape, probably a head or two shorter than him, various spikes on its sides—long, unruly hair most likely—and the gleaming blood color of Nepenthe's blade pointing towards the ground. He saw no features or color in the stranger's appearance, just a silhouette where the darkness seemed inclined to blend with it than the other way around. Despite that, he knew the figure was smiling. He could sense it. He could remember it.

"What are you doing here? Why do you have that?" he asked, his eyes gesturing towards the sword he thought they destroyed when their grandfather kicked the bucket. His voice was calm, too. It should be; he had something to really focus on now. Thoughts and worries of Yang were relegated to the wayside as the conversation he had been waiting for five years to happen was about to be realized. More than anything, Qrow wanted to know why she decided to return after all this time, in their old childhood home no less.

He was certain this place held as much nostalgia to Raven as it did him. Although she had decided to stay in the house for over a year with Tai before she decided to leave without warning. Something must've kept her here—and he couldn't be wrong about her distaste of the place, knowing what he knew—and something again must've made her come back. But what?

His eyes narrowed when her only response was utter silence and a slight tilting of her head to the left, an act he remembered included a growing smirk in her lips. He could already tell that was what she was doing, the same old childish 'I know something you don't' smirk, and now his temperament has gone past the point of patience and diplomacy.

"Raven, I don't have time for your games—"

He realized that, in his anger, he had started forward towards the silhouette, crossing the threshold of the Usher house, and as his foot landed on the living room's ashen-colored flooring, the whole world turned into hell.

Fire raged all around him, clinging and dancing to everything that was flammable, from the curtains framing the windows on the opposite side of the room to the upturned couch he remembered in his youth sitting alongside Raven as they read a picture book together. Bright light blinded him for a while, but he refused to close both eyes and lose sight of his sister—he wouldn't put it past her to take this opportunity to disappear again. She stood where she was, still, never moving despite the inferno that appeared all around them.

His survival instincts screamed at him to get the hell out now. He willed himself to stay after noticing the various oddities that made the whole situation feel more wrong than before.

Black smoke crawled on the ceiling, veiling it completely, and the air remained absent of the putrid ashen scent that would also have him coughing out a storm and crying from the irritation. His ears also picked no deafening noise of crackling and burning, like a fireplace video's volume set to low instead of mute. There was no explosion that greeted his ears, no insurmountable heat that started searing his skin. Sweat soaked him in a hurry, but the cause wasn't the fire... or what looked like fire. It was odd, to say the least, more so when Raven, with no shadows to help her with these psychological games, greeted him with a serious gaze. Her lips weren't forming the smirk he suspected, going down instead of up, and his new suspicions suggested that Raven had been using this expression from the very beginning.

Qrow lifted his sword and pointed the tip at his sister. He had entered an unknown place, with very little idea of how he got here, and his long lost sister had decided to show up out of the blue, with motives as mysterious as the motives she had for leaving five years prior.

"What did you do?" he asked simply, and he did his best to restrain his panicking senses. The fiery room was unsettling his very being. Something wasn't right.

Raven, thankfully deciding to skip unpleasant pandering, looked at him right in the eye and said, "Nothing, dear brother. Well, except for setting the house on fire. I've had enough with this place."

"You and me both," he said, "but the lack of heat would be enough to tell me this is an illusion. Not to mention the quiet. The clean air. The this-is-an-illusion vibe is painted all over, Ray."

Which was strange. Raven could project illusions if supplied with the right Dust to forge a blade imbued with that particular purpose, but no way would she settle with half-assed mind games. If she were serious, he’d be feeling the effects of the flaming room as if he were actually there, not like some… ghost numb from all the dangers.

Raven offered him a lopsided smile, but the meaning behind it eluded him. It was crooked somehow. Like the house.

His eyes narrowed when she raised Nepenthe and made its tip touch with his sword's. He thought they'd be locked in that exchange, neither breaking it until the very last moment of their impromptu ceasefire, but his eyes narrowed further when Raven couldn't keep her hand steady. His eyes moved away from Nepenthe's crimson gleam to Raven herself. Sweat adorned her face as well. A flying piece of ash slapped onto her left cheek and stayed there, dampened by sweat. Her eyes were red, and he meant beyond the iris color they shared. Her chest moved very slowly. Controlled breathing, he realized, which wouldn't be out of place for when she was seconds away from enacting a powerful strike, but if he were to include this symptom with the others, it'd be undeniable that while Qrow was safe from the effects of the flames, Raven was not.

"You shouldn't be here, Qrow," she said. "Yang needs your help."

"How do you know about her?"

"Stop wasting time already. Go to her. Now."

He gritted his teeth. He hated this feeling, the feeling of not knowing which choice was the right one. This wasn't a game he was playing; what he decided at this moment could not be reversed, and although saving a life seemed more important than finding out answers, the hesitation in his soul refused to go away, refused to loosen up. He wanted to save Yang just as much as he wanted Raven to answer every question he had.

But he also knew he couldn't choose both.

"Qrow," Raven said, and he actually detected a hint of worry in her tone. "Yang will die if you don't go to her right now."

"Then why don't _you_ go to her?" he found himself asking. He could've stopped right there, but he didn't. Wouldn't. "You obviously know where she'd be. You'd be right there in an instant."

"Do you trust me with her, then?"

He didn't, and damn her for that.

"You aren't going to abandon her again, are you?" he asked, wanting to get a rise out of her. It would at least give him a clue of where she stood in regards to her own flesh and blood, barring him, of course.

She schooled her features like a pro, but he wasn't her brother for mere show. She reacted from the accusation—just a little. Her eyes immediately blinked.

Something crashed above them. One of the rafters maybe. The whole place was coming down, but his eyes never left Raven.

Sighing as if she lost, Raven said, "You've always been this stubborn."

He arched an eyebrow. "And you've always been dodging questions."

That prompted a smile. "The answers will come in time. I'll assure you of that."

"Then excuse me while I assume the worst."

Raven tapped the tip of his sword with her own. The fire surrounding crawled on the ground, setting alight the old wood with a trail of smoke and a cacophony of never-ending crackles. Her breathing started becoming erratic.

It was hard to believe the tears that trailed down Raven's cheeks. But a second later, he figured it was the smoke getting heavier. He still couldn't understand why the environment focused on her, not on him, despite being in the same area.

She tapped the tip a few more times, as if testing it, and he decided to answer back with a taps of his own. The clang of metal resounded, almost as loud as a coin dropping on a tile floor. They met eye-to-eye again, and this time, it didn't last long.

Raven pulled back Nepenthe, but did not sheathe it. "You remember the tiny clearing I found when we were eight?"

"Can't say I do."

"Liar," she deadpanned, humor and patience gone. "Yang will be there. The Beowolves will have surrounded her by now. Get to her quickly."

"Raven—"

She thought the conversation over already and turned to escape through the windows on the opposite side of the living room. Qrow gave chase, meeting her halfway to her destination. She swung Nepenthe, he responded in kind, and as their blades interlocked in a more dangerous embrace, he would make sure she wouldn't leave until she give him answers.

Out of all the things she could've done, Qrow didn't expect his sister to spit into his eye and then knee him in the gut. The knee, he could've defended himself against, but as begrudging as it was to admit, the eye-spit was a nice, if very dirty, touch. His Aura hadn't saved him from either blow. He fell to the floor, groaning pathetically.

"Ugh," he said, keeping the afflicted eye shut as he wiped it off with his sleeve, "sister germs."

"Tiny clearing," Raven said, and his ears picked up several knocks on wood. "Get to her!"

She made a break for the windows.

"Ray!" He tried standing up, but something pulled at his cape. Several kunai were stabbing it deeply onto the wooden floor. "Fuck!"

When he looked back towards her exit, she had already passed through, never to be seen again. No, he wasn't about to let her go. Not now. He couldn't waste time; he removed his cape and gave chase, leaping over the flaming couch and dove straight through the open window on the right.

It wasn't open at all, and Qrow shielded himself with his Aura as various glass shards scattered at his passing. The mist returned to block his vision. He hadn't realized it was absent while he was inside, within that weird illusion. His feet landed on soft, muddy ground, and he quickly checked all around him. No Grimm, no Raven. And when he looked back towards the old place, the raging fires from within had disappeared like the illusions they were.

 _All of it illusions_ , Qrow thought. _Nothing but illusions_.

He wanted to pick a direction and head right off, eyes peeled for a hint of black or red while trying his best to not confuse them with Grimm—

He shook his head. Who was he kidding? If Raven refused to be followed, her Semblance would ensure she'd go to places even he couldn't follow. It was frustrating—utterly maddening—to admit that his sister got away from him again, leaving behind more questions than answers.

Why was she here? What did she know about Yang? Did she mean the Yang of this time or the Yang of the future? Was she telling the truth about Yang in that old clearing?

How he wished he could summon her right here and now, so he could strangle the answers out of her. Yes, _strangle_ , because my God she deserved that much and more.

"Qrow!"

His eyes widened and looked to his right, and he saw Raven there, standing proudly and smiling. But—

"Come on, Qrow," she said, but not to him but at someone to her left. "Hurry it up or I'll leave you behind."

She had shrunk. She looked like a kid. A short, pony-tailed kid with a big grin on her face. And acting as tomboyish as he remembered.

_What the fuck?_

"I _am_ hurrying," a boyish voice replied, somewhere beyond the mist, getting closer. A feeling in his gut was telling him he knew who it'd be, but it was beyond illogical. It was downright insane. No way was it possible. Yet there was a kid Raven standing no more than three feet from where he stood, tapping her foot impatiently. And he was certain she called out his name.

When the boy finally came into his sights, Qrow held his breath. Impossible. It was impossible.

"Where are we going anyway?" the boy asked.

"I found a super ultra secret spot in the forest," kid Raven said.

"And?"

"Hurry it up and I'll show ya." Her grin grew. So did Qrow's urge to scream. Memories he thought forgotten were surfacing, as if they had spontaneously gotten lifejackets. He remembered telling Ray that he couldn't believe she dragged him outside—

"I can't believe you dragged me outside to look at another stupid hiding spot," the boy grumbled, crossing his arms. Strapped to his right wrist was a familiar emblem.

Qrow inadvertently clutched the pendant on his neck.

"Detective Noir was on," the boy continued.

"Eh," kid Raven said, shrugging, "it was probably a rerun." Pause. "Now come on! Before the old fart realizes we're gone."

Kid Raven started running, and all the boy could do was sigh through his nose. "We are _so_ getting grounded for this," he said before giving chase.

Qrow remembered getting punished but not grounded for their prolonged disappearance.

The kids never looked at him, as if he wasn't even there. Or maybe there was something else at play. More illusions no doubt. All of this, illusions. It had to be. He felt no presence from them, no displacement of air, no audible footsteps marking their trek—and with the muddy ground they crossed, footprints _should_ be present.

"And they're as see-through as holograms," he murmured, staring wide-eyed at the spot where he last saw them before the mist gobbled them up. Another, newer bead of sweat ran down his cheek. He swallowed a lump in his throat. "Or ghosts."

He let out a laugh, brimming with unreleased tension. "What the fuck." He rubbed his eyes with one hand and used the other to pull out his flask. Fuck sobriety. He couldn't process the bullshit in front of him without being drunk first.

* * *

  **IV**

"I thought I was losing my mind," Qrow said as he downed another glass of whiskey. Tai paced himself, knowing that his alcohol tolerance wasn't in the same level as his liver-abusing teammate, but the contents of this story was making it hard for him to stay sober.

Raven.

It was unbelievable that she'd come back, and though he was relieved she still lived, he felt nothing else. He had thought he'd be angry that she dared to come back after leaving without warning, without a message, completely cutting any and all communications between her and her friends and family. He had even thought he'd be happy that she returned, despite understanding that after five years, their lives—his and undoubtedly hers as well—had moved on. His heart surely hadn't yet.

That was what he thought initially, but hearing the confirmation from Qrow's own mouth did almost nothing to him. Other than the small relief, Tai was numb to his old lover's comeback. Maybe the impact wasn't there because she never bothered to visit him or their little girl?

He couldn't figure out what was going on inside Raven's head. He managed to know some bits back when they were dating, and a lot more when he was living in the Usher House with her, but Raven always refused to open herself completely. She loved him, this he knew, and the feeling was mutual. _Had been_ mutual, anyway, but there were plenty of moments in their time together where she could have mentioned anything that bothered her, memories that disturbed her, woke her up in the middle of the night silently screaming. Or desire to beat her pregnant belly with a reason known only to her, and even then Tai wondered if there was any reason at all, that she just felt like hitting their baby. Their baby...

The numbness in his heart grew. He had a hunch on why she came and went. He thought of Yang. Their daughter, who would be graced with Raven's beauty as she reaches her teen years. Then he thought of Ruby, the daughter of Raven's best friend—

 _Stop!_ his mind screamed. _Don't think it's Ruby's fault. It's unfair to her. Besides, you don't know for sure she never checked in._ And if she did? Would that change things between them? _No. It won't. I moved on. She might have, too._

He poured himself a glassful of whiskey and chugged it down.

"What happened next?" he asked, after Qrow had gone silent for some time.

"You don't think I'm crazy?"

He raised an eyebrow at him. "Qrow, sleeping upstairs right now is my seventeen-year-old daughter Yang and attending kindergarten right now is my five-year-old daughter Yang. Both are the same person. Doesn't that sound crazy?"

Qrow laughed, its tone half-filled with mirth, the other was empty, almost soul-less. He rested his elbows on his knees and then leaned his face on his left hand, covering it. "It does," he said. "It _does_ sound crazy."

"Yet it's real."

"Real," Qrow parroted, chuckling again. "Yeah. Real."

Silence reigned for a good ten seconds before Tai asked his question again. This time, his friend didn't go off on another tangent.

 

* * *

 

 

"I drank the whole flask, of course," he said, repeating the motion as if what he held in his hand was a container filled with flask instead of a wide drinking glass that had been emptied for some time. He must've been too engrossed in the memory, because he paused from his story momentarily to stare at the glass and wondered why he was trying to swallow air. He then pursed his lips and set the glass down back on the table. "Didn't get me completely drunk, which I wanted. Not enough drink to do so. Pissed me the hell off."

Tai turned his head towards the empty bottles of whiskey on the table, then back to his old friend. "Feeling drunk now?"

"Not in the least." An eye roll. "Too agitated to let the alcohol do its work, you know. This whole day has left me being sober without my consent."

"Now if only that can be done every day..."

"Shut up, and fuck you, Tai," Qrow replied, though there was no bite coming alongside his bark. He just said the words like a cashier greeting a customer for the millionth time in his long customer service career. "Anyway, since I was both half-drunk and morbidly curious, I followed the hallucinations to wherever the fuck that clearing Raven was talking about. In truth, I kind of expected to be ambushed by Grimm while on the way. Expected and welcomed, really." He shifted in his seat, pushing his body further into the back cushions and slumped down till his nape rested on the headrest and his eyes bore into the ceiling instead of the HV. "The way those two talked to each other reminded me too much of what we used to be."

" _Weren't_ they you and Ray?"

He lifted his left hand, palm up. "On the one hand, I'd like to say yes. But on the other"—he lifted his right hand, also palm up, before crunching it into a fist—"I'd like to punch the asshole that decided to rummage through old forgotten memories." He dropped his hands back onto the couch, where they bounced once, twice, and settled in place. "To cut to the chase, they led me right to the clearing, seconds away from Yang getting gang-mauled by a pack of Beowolves again."

Tai's hands clenched, and he took a deep breath. _She's fine_ , he told himself. _She's in bed, none the worse for wear. Calm._

Qrow swiped the air with an imaginary sword. "Ended them all in three seconds, tops. The Alpha took another three, but it never managed to touch Yang." He smiled at him, to which he smiled back, and somehow Tai felt that it was as crooked as Qrow's. Their smiles faded, and Qrow continued, "It's hard to explain what happens after, though. But... I'll try.

"So I rushed back to Yang, and black Grimm smoke was rising all around us, and my mind suddenly flashed back to the old place, when it was on fire, when I was there shooting the breeze with Raven, and... I don't know, I guess I was thinking back on her warning and wished that I had listened to it earlier." He sighed heavily. "Yang didn't move. I thought she was already dead, but there was no blood, but even then, I just had to make sure. I went to her and lifted her up, checked her pulse and breathing. I let my guard down for only a few seconds, Tai. Just a few seconds.

"But it was enough for another Alpha to get the jump on us. It leaped from the branches above." Qrow sighed, shook his head. "You wouldn't have known it was there, waiting, till it decided to pounce on you. I got my sword ready, but then suddenly Yang gasped in my arm and there was this blinding flash of light."

Qrow turned towards him, probably wanting to know that he hadn't nodded off. Or maybe he was waiting for even a pinch of disbelief on Tai's face. Unsure of what Qrow was expecting, Tai just nodded, which seemed to be the response he wished and he resumed his recollection.

"I looked at the light without thinking. It was unbelievably bright. And I don't know if it was another illusion, but I swore I saw Yang's missing arm."

"The one she saw when she went jogging?"

He shrugged. "Could be."

"You're not sure?"

"Hey, with the day I was having, how could I be sure of anything? An arson that wasn't really there, ghosts of the past that aren't really there. How can this glowing arm be any different?" He paused, pursed his lips, and then shook his head again. "Anyway, this arm glowed like crazy. It was bright like a Dust shard gone critical or something. And as bright and sudden as it appeared, it vanished. Again, I guess. But that wasn't the weirdest part.

"The Alpha Beowolf stopped. Stopped midair, Tai. By a glowing hand grabbing its head. And I don't need to know what's going on inside Glynda's head to understand that what I was seeing was Yang's right arm. Somehow the arm managed to detach itself from Yang and just... I don't know what the fuck it wanted to do or what it had turned into. A flying, independent ghost arm? How the hell am I saying that while sober?"

Unsure if that was supposed to be rhetorical or not, Tai went for a straightforward reply: "Then?"

Qrow, instead of answering right away, rubbed his forehead with both hands as if he were fighting a distracting migraine and then slid his fingers through his fringe, the top of his head, and all the way down to his nape where they settled, intertwining, as he looked at his lap.

"Qrow. What happened then?"

"I can't get that sound out of my head."

"What sound?"

"Egg shells," he said gravely, and though he sounded as if it haunted him, Tai didn't feel the same. "Not breaking bones, no, not even close. The hand just grabbed the Alpha's skull"—he reenacted the action as he told it—"and crushed it. It sounded like cracking an egg in your hand. And it was loud. Fucking loud." He grabbed his ears. "And you know that feeling in your body, the one that feels like something's beating at your organs as the speakers went crazy loud?"

The old nightclub Team STRQ used to spend their Saturday night once or twice during their sophomore year. It had been Qrow's idea, though his attention was more on the bar than on the music or the people or the darkness, which was marred somewhat by bright colorful strobe lights scattered about the dance floor, or even the general unhappiness of their team leader, who always wondered why people would tolerate bursting their eardrums, torturing their livers, and clogging their lungs with unventilated cigarette smoke. It was as if their purpose in life was to die with a shattered body. The general complaint of the team was the loud music. Not even Qrow, the instigator of the whole thing, would go to the nightclub without earplugs.

"Yeah," Tai said, trying to recall just how uncomfortable he felt while trying to have fun in that nightclub. "Not a nice experience, but the booze was good."

"Amen to that, pal. But that odd feeling? Somehow it was worse here. It was loud, but it wasn't killing my ears. Yet my insides were feeling it twice, maybe thrice, over." He sighed. "I know it sounds underwhelming, but that's the point. How is something like the sound of egg shells break be so... excruciating to listen to?"

Tai didn't have an answer to that, and he would've shrugged if Qrow had looked at him, if Qrow had wanted a definite answer to this conundrum.

"After that," Qrow continued, "I just carried Yang out of there. Got her back here, patched her up—"

 _Oh yeah, you did a splendid job on that front, asshole._ He swung the thought away like an annoying fly.

"—and I just... I don't know, wanted to forget everything. This bundle of bullshit was one too much for me to think over. So... I drank."

 _A lot_ , Tai thought with a raised brow, and he let that matter rest for now. He used the returning silence to mull over the story, wanting to be sure that Qrow had not left any detail unsaid, trying to find some semblance of rationality was completely thrown out the window when he started talking about illusions, ghosts, and an old friend. Stranger things had happened, of course—Yang, as he already pointed out, was a testament of that—but that didn't mean every ounce of fiction in the world had a gallon of truth in them.

"Qrow," he said.

His friend grunted.

"Why do you think—"

Both men heard the creaking staircase, followed by bare feet gently stepping on aged wood, the stride out of rhythm and slow. Tai stood up, but Qrow stayed where he sat, but both of their attentions were on the left archway leading out to the corridor.

Yang came into view, hand on her forehead. She took a glance at the living room, saw them sitting in the couch with a bunch of empty whiskey bottles on the coffee table, and didn't ask. She just waved her hand in greeting at them and sauntered into the kitchen.

Tai looked at Qrow.

Qrow looked back and continued leaning on the couch. "Hey, she's your kid, not mine."

 _Goddamn asshole_ , he thought and walked towards the kitchen. _Acting like this is my problem now._

He could've forced the issue, have Qrow talk with Yang since he knew more about what went on in that forest than Tai did. All Tai got was secondhand information relayed to him by a man who had been chugging whiskey for the past hour or two.

When he got to the kitchen's entrance, Yang had procured a glass from a top cabinet and was filling it with tap water.

"Yang?"

She turned off the tap, grabbed the glass, and looked over her shoulder. Haggard and fatigued. They were what described Yang first and foremost. There was also a slight dullness in her lilac eyes and the haggard, dark skin prominent under those same eyes made Tai recall the blackening ends of a fluorescent tube on the verge of giving out. "Yeah?" she said, her voice a little rough and dry. She coughed lightly.

"Are you feeling okay?" he asked. While he knew it sounded quite rhetoric, he couldn't think of anything else to direct the conversation towards that particular topic.

Yang answered with a bit lip, a momentary glance to the ground, and then, "Nothing like some food, some water, and a night's sleep wouldn't help. Oh, and a truckload of aspirin."

"Yang, you know you can talk to me."

"Yeah," she said, pausing to finish her glass. "I know."

Yang said nothing else. Tai waited.

She placed the glass on the sink and turned on the tap. The water poured into the glass till it was full. But the water kept pouring and overflowing, pouring and overflowing, and she had yet to remove her hand from the tap.

"Yang."

She acted like static jolted her spine, and though he could see just her back and the noticeable patches of dried up mud spots on her hair, he somehow knew the kind of expression she wore when he called her and when she immediately closed the tap.

"Dad, I—"

Before their conversation could continue, his Scroll vibrated in his pocket. A pleasant tone reverberated around the silence, and he had a momentary debate on whether to take the call or continue the talk with Yang.

"You going to get that?" she asked, a close enough indication than he should answer the call rather than get her to answer to him.

He fished out his Scroll to check the caller's ID and saw that it was Mrs. Ivory.

His eyes narrowed. Ivory rarely called his Scroll, unless it was about an urgent last-minute faculty meeting or a rowdy student who bit off more than they could chew in their games of "I'm better than you and I'll prove it!" where a few, if not some, dunces decided hunting Grimm unsupervised was an excellent measure of strength and skill.

"We'll be talking about this later, Yang," he said, finger on the phone-shaped icon in the center of the screen, ready for sliding, "so go wash up and get some more rest."

"Okay," Yang said, her voice sounding relieved, if a little subdued. "I wasn't joking about the aspirin, though."

"Right, top shelf in the medicine cabinet." He accepted the call. "Hello. Ivory?"

"Taiyang," Ivory said, pausing for some reason.

"What is it? Problem at the school?"

"Not at Signal, no, but there is..." She paused again, stumbling on her own words.

Tai hurried it on lest Ivory spends another fifteen seconds being tongue-tied. "If not Signal, then why'd you call?"

"It's... It's about Yang."

A pit suddenly formed in his stomach. "Wha—"

"I came to the kindergarten to pick up my grandson when I saw Yang talking to this strange-looking woman. Never saw her before. She wasn't a teacher here. She felt dangerous, like a Huntress fresh from a Grimm excursion."

"Ivory," he said, doing his best to keep calm and the panic from seeping into his speech, "where's Yang?"

"Still with her here at the front ga—"

Silence, but the line hadn't been cut. He could hear a buzzing cacophony of excited school children happy that school was over for today.

"Ivory. Ivory, you still there?"

"Y-Yes, I'm still here, but I lost sight of Yang and the woman."

The pit widened.

He could feel his blood boil, the power hidden within his fists slowly building. "I'll be there in a flash. Tell me what she looks like."

"All black attire with strips of red. Long black hair past her waist. And... I think her eyes were red like roses."


	6. Red

/ — — **CHAPTER 6** — — \

**Red**

**-o- -o- -o- -o- (   I   ) -o- -o- -o- -o-**

"We'll be talking about this later, Yang, so go wash up and get some more rest."

"Okay," she said, thankful for the reprieve. She honestly thought she'd be interrogated the moment she was up, but Dad was still Dad, it seemed (or rather _will be_ , coz time-travel is an absolute mindfuck for verb tenses). The ever-doting parent. "I wasn't joking about the aspirin, though."

"Right, top shelf in the medicine cabinet. Hello. Ivory? What is it? Problem at the school?"

She put her glass back in the sink and again switched on the tap.

"If not Signal, then why'd you call?"

She turned the tap off and picked up the glass. She heard Dad murmuring something to the caller, but by then she was doing her best to ignore the stream of words. This was a private conversation she doubted Dad wanted her to hear, so she double-timed getting out of the kitchen. The pulsing headache might've also helped in this decision. It prodded her temple incessantly.

She climbed up the stairs, shaking her head for a second when the pain pulsed through it like a tangible strike of lightning (and oh how she would like to say that was a hyperbole, but she drew the comparison from her experience back in Signal with a girl who forgot to tune down the voltage of her stun rod). She hurried to the bathroom. There was a pain relief pill in the medicine cabinet with her name on it. The migraine got worse once she was looking at her reflection, her skin paler by a few shades, which made the bags under her tired eyes a lot more noticeable. Opening the pill container proved its own challenge, as it was optimally designed for two hands—one for holding, the other for pressing down the cap while turning it—but she later realized that getting _just one_ pill out became a grueling test of her patience. Though she was careful, three pills instead of one dropped out and splashed into the glass she set on the sink's counter.

Yang gritted her teeth, on the verge of crushing the medicine container. She wanted to. The pain in her head was absolutely unbearable, and if she weren’t so fucking tired she’d take out her frustrations at the punching bag, but right now, the plastic bottle was a good alternative. It’d be easy, too. Just squeeze, squeeze, _squeeze_ the ever fucking _shit_ out of this _goddamn_ bottle and she’d feel better about everything. She’d feel better and the pain would go away. She’d feel better and oh fucking God how she wished she could poke out those annoying red eyes in the mirror and—

She stopped and set the medicine bottle on the counter (not too gently). She inhaled deeply and exhaled deeply. Inhale. Exhale. With a shaky hands, she turned on the tap and splashed her face. Calm was eluding her, a contrast to the headache that was hell-bent on making her head experience an aneurysm.

_Heh, an aneurysm at the young age of seventeen._ Yang turned off the tap and wiped her face on the towel hanging at the back of the bathroom door. _Fitting. I already feel too old for this._

She resealed the medicine container and then chugged her aspirin drink without another thought. So she had three pills in her system now, whoop-dee-fucking-doo. It wouldn't kill her. As long as it stops the headache—which she could feel growing in intensity for every heartbeat that pulsed the blood in her veins—then she's fine to take as much as she needs.

The rest of her sure as hell was in need of relief. She had woken up in bed feeling the prick of a million pin needles all over her body, even on the arm whose phantom still haunts her (and pains her, because you know, _phantom pain_ , haha badum tss) to this day. It was less getting up from bed and more like dragging herself out of bed after a merciless yesterday filled with physical exercises that challenged her muscles to their limits. She could've slept in, could've snuggled deeper in her pillow and let the aches pass away with the passage of sleep and time, but questions kept her up. She had realized a minute after awakening that Qrow saved her from the Grimm, carried her back to her home, and patched and cleaned her up. Qrow saved her life.

This was the third time now. As thankful as she was for her uncle, she was also mad at him. It sounded stupid, but she hated being saved like that, more so when it was multiple times by the same guy. It made her seem weak, made her seem like she couldn't look after herself. And a look to her right side would point out that she was those things, but she didn’t, refused to even put a millisecond of thought into it, because it would only make her angrier at someone who didn’t deserve such. This was irrational thinking at its finest, lashing out like a cut live wire. She knew this, _understood_ this, but more often than not, her feelings could not be swayed by thought, no matter what logic was applied. Having a short fuse tends to make one used to rationale being splattered with red, blind and disoriented, as the unpredictable Rage assumes control for a short while.

The new dents on the medicine container proved the Signal and Beacon professors right: she needed more self-control. But it was easier said than done.

She set the now empty glass down on the counter and walked back to her bedroom. Her ears picked up the loud conversation between Qrow and Tai downstairs, somehow louder but like the first horrible journey downstairs, she would be unable to discern their words till she was about six or seven steps away from the ground floor landing. She hadn't meant to eavesdrop, but Qrow had started retelling the events in Qrow's point of view—from the Branwen ghost children to the golden phantom arm that went corporeal for no apparent reason—and when he got to the point of eggshells cracking, the great emphasis of it, got her recalling her own experience with that sound.

The bright light, the feeling in her right arm again, the satisfaction from the belief of pushing a Grimm's face in, and the subsequent tornado of rolls, hits, and tumbles that got her sailing to that clearing. Her headache throbbed, shooting a salvo of pain straight into the front and back of her brain. With one hand massaging her temples, she shifted her weight from one leg to the other and the stairs under her groaned like a bull frog's mating call. The conversation below halted almost instantly, and she wished she could groan out her frustrations like the old wood. She sighed through her nose and descended to the ground floor. The coffee table was littered with empty liquor bottles, making her wish the two guys had woken her up so she could join in and forget—just forget and forget, even if it was just for today. Her thirst came forth and she settled for fresh water instead. She got water, the pin needles in her brain were acting like pogo sticks, she was too irritated by the pain to have a very civil conversation with her Dad, and she was saved from any further inquiry with a faculty call.

Back to the present and some ten steps away from her bedroom door, Yang expected Qrow climbing up by now to ask her about what happened to her in that clearing, but she was still alone in the second floor. Baby Ruby was playing in daycare and her little doppelganger was learning in kindergarten.

She had the whole floor to herself and her bed was calling for its owner to come lay on it. Downstairs had gone quiet—or at least their conversation had stopped for the time being—but she was not in the mood to think about old men problems. Her head felt like it was about to split in two, and she honestly wished sleep would take her the moment she collapsed onto the mattress, anything to skip the hours spent suffering through this pain.

A small thought came to her when she entered the bedroom: _Why do I have a headache anyway?_

She lay down on the bed, closed her eyes, and breathed deep, in and out. The thought died a quiet death afterwards. And it seemed her wish for instant sleep came true, because as far as Yang remembered, she opened her eyes again to see the sunrays through her window taking on a deep orange hue. Her head felt lighter, better, which was good, a drop of good inside a bucketful of bad, but at least it was something to cast a bright (yet very dim) side on a very shitty day.

That was until something wet and rough crossed up her cheek. "Gah!"

Yang reeled back, surprised more than disgusted, but the wet tongue's owner refused to let up and pursued her cheek. The owner barked and panted between several licks, its tail Yang could feel wagging with glee as she caressed its back gently.

"I'm up, Due," she said, keeping her lips away from the corgi's relentless tongue attack, "I'm up. Sheez." She sat up, trying to sound admonishing but the grin on her lips couldn't be contained. Due backed off, looking pacified, although his tail had yet to stop moving crazily about like a gushing fire hose. "What's up, boy? Haven't seen you all day."

Due barked and jumped off the bed. He half-ran towards the opened door, looked back, and barked again.

She got the message immediately. "Need to do your business, eh?"

Due panted with his tongue out.

The headache... was still present but muted. She was unsure how many hours she had been asleep, but she was certain it had been the whole day. Which meant—

Hunger growled inside her stomach, making Due jump with a yelp and perk his ears up for any other signs of a monstrous intruder, although his tail-wagging and excited panting hadn't ceased. Almost like he thought more of it as a game than the presence of a threat.

"Come on, boy," Yang said, getting off her bed with a loud groan escaping her dried up lips, "let's get you outta the house so I can eat in peace."

Due showed her a miffed look. Yang chose to ignore it.

When she came down to the ground floor and halfway from passing the kitchen and living room archways, she looked back at the living room, orange light casting shafts of blinding light through the room’s main (and quite wide) window. Through squinted eyes, she saw the empty alcohol bottles were still on the coffee table, untouched since the last time she’d seen them. It made her pause, look around, listen on the background noise around her. Apart from the rhythmic hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen behind her, Due’s pants, and the quiet groans of the living room ceiling fan that someone forgot to turn off, nothing else registered in her hearing.

“Tai,” she called, stepping into the living room, finding it empty of life, and turning off the ceiling fan herself. “Qrow.”

No one answered. She called their names again, but got the same answer.

_Did they go out somewhere?_

She about-faced and looked at the kitchen clock hanging like a decorative jewel above and between two square windows that she often pictured as giant shining eyes of a Jack-o-lantern when she was a kid.

Dawn would give the windows that eerie lantern shine, but now all she saw was a forest basking in the last half-hour of sunlight before night completely started its graveyard shift. The hands on the clock pointed to **6:35**.

A persistent prodding in her head seemed to be telling her that the current time was important, but this wouldn’t occur to Yang until it was in hindsight. As it was now, she chucked the feeling up to her headache trying to build up again.

Due barked and looked at her with anticipation.

“Oh, yeah,” she said, scratching the back of her head, “outside business.”

The dog responded with a dash to the front door.

_They must’ve left a note somewhere_ , she thought. _I’ll look for it after letting Due out._

But when she reached the foyer, Due was sniffing the front door. He didn’t so much as look at her, all of his attention solely on the door. His tail wasn’t wagging anymore, too.

“What’s—”

Due bared his teeth and growled.

Of all the years he had lived with them, Yang could only remember three separate times when the usually quiet dog growled as menacingly as he was now. He’d bark at strangers and threats, but growling was a rare thing for the corgi to do without proper cause. The first instance was a massive wave of Grimm lurking close to their home when she had been six and coming home from school. The second was when she invited a boy over to play video games and just for that but the boy thought otherwise. The third was on the Grimm attack that took his life.

An empty house, untouched liquor bottles in the living room, and the clock telling her that it was way past the time the kids would be back.

It was little to go on, very little, but that odd feeling gnawing inside her had found a voice at last and it was screaming with abandon, hoping to be heard in time. It was telling her danger now stood behind that door, telling her danger had come for her when she was alone.

Yang swallowed a lump in her throat. “H-Hello?” she said, hoping that whoever was on the other side hadn’t heard the slight hitch in her voice. She took a deep breath and cracked her knuckles with her thumb.

_Thanks for the habit, Uncle Qrow…_

She made her way to the front door. A loud groan underfoot made her jump back, her heart going into a hammering frenzy. Due was the same, though his was more neurotic than Yang would believe, and the perfect image of a Zwei predecessor that could stare into the hated gaze of a Grimm without flinching was shattering into pieces before her.

_The old floorboard. Just the old floorboard._

It didn’t matter to Due; the noise got him spooked and whatever facade he put up to try and scare the anomaly behind the door had ceased to exist now. She had seen him stare down dozens of Grimm before, never flinching like this, never looking fearful like this. This fact only fueled her own fears.

Due was too high-strung for Yang to even think of calming him down. He looked more than likely to bite out of instinct than seek comfort from anything that would touch him. His growls had quickly dissolved into whimpers as he stepped away from the door.

Was that good or bad? Good, because she could now go outside without fear of setting the fear-laden dog off, or bad, because whoever was behind that door could come in with nothing to stop it but a whimpering corgi and a tired, pained, hungry little cripple.

Yang kept taking deep breaths, swallowing spit, and sometimes using said spit to instead moisten her lips. She was not tired. She was not useless. No more. Not anymore. One hand closed into a fist. _Never again._

Without warning, her instincts screamed with fear. Something in the air changed—she didn’t know what, didn’t know how, just that something changed, like a lightswitch swiftly changing comfortable light into dark, unseeable shadows. It was like Aura manifested itself into a black hole, swallowing light and leaving behind a void that was free for darkness to occupy.

It was an oppressive, suffocating feeling that had Due scurrying away from the foyer as fast as his little legs could run. Yang wished she could do the same, but the familiarity of this feeling and the remnants of her shattered pride made her stand her ground. Foolhardiness of youth, maybe? Well, while she was afraid and unprepared for a fight, she refused to back down. Not now, not ever.

A lost memory nagged at her, demanding clarity but it was an order her mind failed to fulfill. Her headache worsened in an instant, as if all the pain receptors in her brain simultaneously activated, and it took quite an effort to grit her teeth and constrict her own throat lest the agony formed into either screams or whimpers. Who—or what—was out there would be listening in, and no way was she going to show even an iota of weakness to it.

She heard knocking, but was it the front door or the throbs pounding in her temple? She stepped forward, ignored the groan (from the old floorboard or from her own lips?), and leaned on the wall to right of the door. Her vision swam. The sunset hue plastering the walls deformed into what looked like lava.  She shook her head, blinked a dozen times, bit back the coughs squeezing her throat. Deep breathing did no good other than convince her she needed a hot shower after this.

_Focus, dammit!_

She gave little thought to what she was about to do. The pain and exhaustion was making it hard to think, like taking a final written exam with a high fever, but a small part of her understood that grabbing the door handle with the intent of turning it and pulling it in was a very bad idea. So why wasn’t she erring on the side of caution and stay away from the danger? Was it pride? Was it stupidity? The metal was cold against her shaking hand. She clenched it tight—the left crushing the cold with its heat, the right digging its phantom nails into its equally phantom palm.

_Bad idea. BAD IDEA!_

She ignored that cowardly thought and opened the door. The shadow the sun cast on the cottage stretched all the way to the boundary of the dense forest, the shape of it deformed to such an extent that the chimney, located at the middle of the cottage’s longest wall, had migrated closer to the front entrance, veiling the rest of the dirt road leading away from the house in gradually thickening shadows. And that same road was empty of people or Grimm, which had been her next suspect for the oppressive feeling.

_It’s gone_ , she thought as she took two steps outside and felt a light breeze moving from north to south. The pressure, the powerful presence of danger, had disappeared the moment she opened the door. Even her headache was gone. _From bad to peace in an instant. How?_

Then a new disturbing thought came up: _Am I losing my mind?_

More than a few times this past month Yang had been asking herself this question. The reality before her had done its best to have her question everything she saw, from the 12-years-removed people she knew to the missing limb that won’t stop acting like some Schrödinger’s cat. It would’ve been the simplest explanation to everything thus far since she woke up from that bitter defeat with the midget. But, like life itself, the answer wouldn’t be that straightforward. The pain, the joy, the sadness, the comfort, the ups and downs of being in this time, they were all real as far as she was concerned.

And if that were the case, then this current situation was not a figment of her imagination. Due reacted violently, but he did it to try and keep his overwhelming fear in check. Something had spooked him, something tangible, something real. And now it was gone without a trace.

It wasn’t a satisfying answer, but it at least grounded her and her senses.

_It couldn’t have left without any sort of trace, though_ , Yang thought, hoping she was right about this. If not, it would be another mystery to add into the pile of shit she would have to crawl through for who-knows-how-long. She looked left, then right, instinctively swatting away a lone wind-swept leaf from hitting her face.

If that hadn’t happened she might have missed the body slouching at the corner of her home. At least it looked like a body at first glance, a body roughly covered in a crimson red sheet that made Yang think of a mummy that continued bleeding through all of its pores even after embalming and burial. It was also small, like a child, and wasn’t moving.

Yang looked around her again. She swallowed nervously. She gave her knuckles some thumb-abuse again, but no pop. Her eyes tracked back to the slumped body, still there, still unmoving. Someone came here when she was alone in the house and dropped this off. For what? For what reason?

“Maybe it’s not what I think it is,” she murmured to herself, watching the wrapped object as if afraid it would come and snap her neck the moment she blinked. “Maybe it’s just some stuff the neighbors borrowed. No one answered the door so they just left it here.”

_But why cover it in a red sheet?_ Her mind asked. _Why a red sheet at all?_

It would be easy to step back inside the house and wait for Tai or Qrow to come back. Maybe call them up immediately, just in case. But if she did that, she would never get her mind off the red sheet in the interim. Besides that, she’d look like a scared little girl again because a human-shaped object covered in red fabric had her asking for help. No way did she want that, not after all the shit she’d been today and the past month.

_What’s the worst that can happen, anyway?_

A scare, maybe? Was she afraid to find a corpse beneath that sheet? A child—

_Mini-me should’ve been home by now. Ruby too._

—corpse?

Her eyes widened. She shook her head. “No,” she whispered. “Can’t be.”

Her imagination was running wild. Just running wild, that’s all. There was no way for that child-sized bump to be a body, especially not the body of who she thinks it’d be.

She belatedly noticed her legs had run wild as well, bolting towards the corner of the house within a second and no deceleration in mind until the last second. Her right shoulder bumped and skidded on the cottage’s logged wall. Instead of pushing herself back, she leaned more onto the wall, hoping there was enough friction to help her bare heels digging into the moist dirt to make a full stop. Yang tripped forward, face heading straight onto the red sheet, and then managed to reassert her balance before her face made contact. Heart hammering in her chest, she slowly leaned back and experimentally sniffed the air. No smell of decay, so it wasn’t a corpse.

_What if it was a really fresh kill?_

She bit her lip, clenched her fists.

_Stop it. It’s not a corpse, it’s not a fresh kill. Stop being so morbid!_

She eyed the area again, but the sun was on its final farewell for the day, shadow gradually overcoming the light. Hesitation and fear gnawed at her senses again. Yang wished for and dreaded their departure. It seemed silly to have such thoughts, but irrationality had been a constant companion of hers since she got here, so why was she still so surprised of its presence in her life?

Yang grabbed the red sheet with a shaky hand and slowly pulled it down.

Tufts of blonde hair poked out.

She gasped and continued pulling the sheet down…

_Please don’t be dead please don’t be dead please don’t be dead please don’t—_

Pain penetrated her head like a gunshot. The sheet came free from her hand as she went down on her knees, using said hand to grab her head as if it were the only way to lessen the pain. She closed her eyes. This headache wasn’t normal. It was coming and going as it pleased, and it was starting to _really_ annoy her.

Yang took deep breaths, but it did nothing to lessen the pain. The best she could hope for was for her pain receptors to grow numb at some point. Or maybe just wait for the wave to pass, because if there was one thing that comes and goes like clockwork, it was waves. And just as she hoped, it was disappearing, her head regaining peace and clarity as she reopened her eyes.

“Auntie… Yang?”

Little Yang was thankfully alive, but—

When Yang looked at her younger doppelganger, instead of seeing lilac, all she saw was a smaller pair of eyes that were red like roses.

* * *

**-o- -o- -o- -o- (   II   ) -o- -o- -o- -o-**

**_There is nothing new under the sun._ **

“Yang!”

She woke with a jolt, almost tipping off from the sofa’s arm she sat on and onto the living room floor. She regained her balance, shook her head, and rubbed her still tired eyes. Pain had come to greet her in the waking world, like an ex-boyfriend who refuses to let go, but compared to the kind of hold it had on her nerves once upon an hour (or maybe two) ago, the dull throbbing was as much of a relief as no pain at all.

Who knew swallowing a whole bottle of aspirin was a great help?

Clearing her eyes, she saw Dad dashing towards her.

Well, not _her_ her, but the young one sleeping soundly on the sofa. His shout hadn’t disturbed her, and Yang thanked that bit of mercy, the sight of those shining red eyes still at the forefront of her thoughts and concerns. Dad knelt down and took a few moments to just watch her sleeping form. His face contorted, as if unsure of which emotion to mainly express, but his smile was forever in view, his relief almost palpable. He hovered above little Yang’s head and pecked her in the cheek.

And like the little devil she knew she’d been, little Yang squirmed, faced the other way, and continued to snore quietly.

Yang tried not to laugh, and so did Dad, yet she could somehow tell that trepidation stained his laugh just like hers was, a sort of nervous release she thought fitted better with Weiss whenever she was tasked with cleaning duty. They looked at each other and the mirth—or what bits of it was there to begin with—dwindled in seconds. The joy and relief were not gone, just suppressed, because both he and she understood that more pressing issues have higher priorities. And in this case, each of them had information the other wanted to know, both pertaining to the beginning and end of the sleeping child’s strange kidnapping. It almost seemed surreal to think about it…

Yang had carried her doppelganger back inside and let her sit in the sofa, giving out specific instructions to not move from that spot while she went upstairs to grab her Scroll and call Dad or Qrow. By the time she got back to the ground floor, Dad’s Scroll continued ringing in her phone’s receiver and her ‘cousin-niece’ had gone back to sleep. When Dad finally picked up, Yang was hard-pressed to get a word in due to how panicked and out of breath he was. She was amazed he could still talk so rapidly. Their verbal exchange was a mix of unfinished phrases that were steadily getting more frantic as they started building a picture from the tidbits they shared with each other. In the end, Dad said he’d return home, post haste, and Yang, after going back up to raid the medicine cabinet again, decided to stand guard over her younger self while she waited for his arrival. She held fears of the kidnapper coming back and retaking little Yang, and the reasoning part of her brain got sidetracked by the Painkiller Tsunami that had arrived to swallow and submerge her senses. She thought she’d just let her eyes close for a moment, just a moment, just one fleeting moment, and—

Yang blew out a breath swarming with unreleased nerves and frustrations.

“What exactly happened while I was asleep?” she whispered to Dad, despite already having a good picture of the events. She just needed confirmation. And details.

“It’s hard finding a place to start, really,” Dad murmured as he stood back up. Realizing something, he looked over his shoulder, towards the archway that had a good view of the kitchen. He mouthed “Qrow!” and gestured a ‘come here’ with his chin.

Said uncle came into view, walking out of the kitchen and into the living while holding a large glass of water.

Dad arched an eyebrow, crossed his arms.

Qrow shrugged. “I was thirsty. What did you think I’d do, dehydrate myself to death?” He offered him the glass. “Here’s yours.”

A moment of hesitation, with Dad being half-miffed and half-thankful, but in the end, he took the glass and chugged it till the last drop. He sighed heavily and set the glass down on the coffee table, which still held onto the myriad of whiskey bottles the two men had consumed earlier this morning (or was it afternoon?).

Speaking of consuming…

The moment she realized her plans to sate her hunger were pushed back to prioritize tending to her doppelganger was also the moment her stomach decided to voice its complaint again. It growled with unrelenting ferocity, one could almost mistake it for a Beowolf’s. The two men reeled back, staring at her stomach and then at her reddening face.

“I hadn’t eaten since breakfast,” she reasoned, trying not to pout. God, it was just like being in Team RWBY again. Their faces almost matched Blake’s and Weiss’s when they first heard the growl of her tyrannical organ. She couldn’t even get support from her own sister, because Ruby was busy smothering her face in her corgi pillow to hide her laughter.

Qrow snorted, finding the deactivated holovision the most interesting object in the room.

Dad coughed, maybe to get her attention but more likely to mask his own amusement.

“Qrow, you don’t mind whipping up a sandwich for Yang, do you?”

Qrow snorted. “Calling me here then making me go back? Make up your damn mind.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Dad replied, smirking, “back to the kitchen with you, slave.”

Qrow was already walking out the living room, waving one hand above his head, although if not for present company (Yang 1 and Yang 2), he might’ve flipped Dad the bird as his departing gesture.

“You want to, uh,” she said, pausing as she looked down at her sleeping little self, “send her to bed or—”

“It’s fine,” Dad said, his voice slightly tight. “I don’t wanna lose sight of her for a second.”

Now at least her earlier fears weren’t as paranoid as they were before.

“Do you know who tried to kidnap Yang?” she asked, and her eyes narrowed when Dad stiffened up. A tell. A really _big_ tell right from the get-go.

His eyes drifted from her to Young Yang, who snored calmly along in dreamland, and then back to her.

She nodded and they walked towards the corridor, but never leaving the view of the living room. It was unlikely for the kidnapper to attempt another kidnap, but rarely anything rational stemmed from fear and worry. Even if the odds were less than one percent, she knew Dad would still keep one eye on her at all times.

“So,” she said, “who was it?”

“Hmm?”

“The kidnapper.”

“You must be famished,” Dad said. “How about eating that sandwich before we discuss—”

She pointed her thumb to the kitchen, where Qrow busied himself with staring at the oven toaster, an opened plastic-wrapped bread loaf set to the side of it.

“Uh,” Dad said, scratching the back of his head, finding it difficult to look at her straight, “well…”

Yang set her hand down. “My stomach can wait for another five minutes. Will it really take more than that for you to tell me who the kidnapper is?”

She knew she was sounding a little condescending, but her patience was wearing thin. Dad was being tight-lipped merely to delay the inevitable. Yang would learn the details of the time she had been asleep, so that left him having control of _when_ she would, and she disliked it. Dad might have reasons for the dodginess, but she couldn’t care less about the circumstances. Someone had tried to kidnap her younger self and had succeeded, but then decided to send her back with her Aura awakened. Who exactly would do that?

Dad sighed, weariness moving out of him like a party blower—it comes out, but when the wind is gone, it comes rolling back.

“It was Raven.”

Yang’s throat made a sound. Both of her hands tightened into fists. She tried to say something, but nothing but quiet air left her open mouth.

“She came when Yang was leaving school,” he continued, probably wanting to let it all out now before hesitation seals his lips, “and… I guess she must’ve introduced herself. That’s the only thing I can think of that’d let Yang come with her.”

She could understand that. She would most likely have done the same, maybe even bombard dear old Mom with a billion and one questions she had ever since she learned Summer was really her stepmom. What else would she have felt at that time, she wondered. Maybe elation for seeing her back and picking her up from school like a real parent. Maybe sadness for knowing that she hadn’t been there since she was born. Maybe curiosity, because she would want to know all about the situation between her, Dad, and Summer.

“Qrow and I searched everywhere for her,” Dad continued. “Qrow was convinced Ray was already long gone with Yang, but”—he took a glance back at the sofa, where Young Yang continued dreaming dreams in ignorant bliss—“I never believed it. Somehow I knew she was still in Patch. Somehow I just… _knew_.” He shook his head, shrugged. “It’s hard to explain.”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner? Why didn’t you let me help?”

He shook his head again, the corners of his mouth curved down. “You were dead on your feet, Yang. You’ll just—”

He stopped, looked away.

_You’ll just slow us down._

_You’ll just be a liability._

It was left unsaid, but the reason was clear as day. She had been quite out of it, that morning, more concerned with sleep and solitude than anything else going on around her.

Yang gritted her teeth behind her tightened lips, wanting to rebuke Dad despite the rational part of her agreeing to his decision.

_Useless._

The word echoed within her.

_Liability._

_Reckless._

_Inept._

**_Pathetic._ **

She closed her eyes, took deep quiet breaths. The conversation stalled, but more than anything, Yang wanted them to move past this topic, so she spearheaded into one that immediately came to mind.

“Yang’s Aura is unlocked.”

She felt a tidbit of regret for bringing this up, but then again, if she were to hide this fact till the very last second she’d be no better than Dad. The miniscule regret was stomped out completely.

“What did you say?”

“When I found her outside, her Aura had already been unlocked.” She turned towards the living room, watching the subtle rise and fall of Young Yang’s torso. “It happened to me too, you know, sleeping like a log.”

Of course, she had her Aura unlocked at ten, not five, and by a professional Huntsman teacher who took the process slowly, not a strange and mysterious mother who might’ve done a rushed job, thus in all likelihood, would do more harm than good. Unlocking the Auras of children below the age of seven was frowned upon for a reason.

“How are you sure? How can you be sure?” He grabbed her by the shoulders, his grip gentle but firm. Fear spread over his face, like a badly done makeup job.

She closed her eyes, channeled her Aura and some of her anger into them, and then opened them again. “ _These_ looked right back at me. And I’ve had them since I got my Aura unlocked.”

Dad looked at her eyes, blinking, mouth open. He stepped back, shaking his head, and cast another worried glance at the living room, where little Yang sleepily rubbed her eyes, yawned, and got comfortable for more hours of sleep.

“Dammit, Raven,” he murmured, one hand going up to grab his temple. He inhaled deep, words eager to come out through gritted teeth, but he sighed instead, maybe thinking that his words wouldn’t reach its recipient even if he were to shout them atop Vale’s CCT tower.

“It’s temporary,” Yang said. “I mean, I had red eyes all the way till the next morning, but it’s not permanent, so—”

“So she did this to you, too?”

“Huh?”

“Raven.” Dad walked towards her, his voice turning unpleasant. “Did she take you away for a while just so she can unlock your Aura, too?”

She blinked, then looked down at the ground, mind awhirl. “No,” she said lamely, “she didn’t. I… I got mine unlocked at school when I was ten.”

“Then we can’t be sure that everything’ll be all right with Yang.” He paused a little. “And this opens up a big question.”

“Why was Raven here in Patch,” Qrow said, coming out of the kitchen with a plate of sandwiches in one hand and the red sheet she left outside in the other, “and why did she feel the need to forcibly unlock Tiny’s Aura?”

Before either of them could respond, Uncle set the plate on the hallway table and said to her, “But more than that, I’m quite interested on how exactly she knew about you specifically.”

“Raven might’ve been spying on—”

“I’m not ruling that out, Tai. Ray’s a goddamn voyeur at times.”

Dad looked away from them, arms crossed and a bit of pink fluttering his cheeks.

Okay, _eww_ on the mental image that brought.

“But,” Qrow continued, “we got something new to consider about her.” He held up the red sheet and turned back onto her. “You said you found Tiny under this?”

“Yeah,” she answered, looking between the sheet and her uncle. “So?”

He shook his head. “This isn’t a sheet.” He held the fabric on two ends and spread it out.

Yang’s eyes widened.

“It used to be a cloak.”

“Ruby,” she muttered, and both men snapped their attention at her. “I thought I’d recognize it anywhere.” But with night earnestly crawling up the sky and most of her attention centered on what was _under_ the cloak than the cloak itself, she couldn’t really be faulted for missing that detail. Moreso when the cloak in question had its hood completely torn out and its tail end cut up to about the length that would reach her fifteen-year-old sister’s knees. What drew the most recognition from the fabric was the cross-shaped pins still clinging to the edges of where the hood used to be.

Qrow sighed. His shoulders sagged. “Kid,” he said, eyes growing very weary, a look that was putting definite fear in Yang, “I really wish the stuff I found was just coincidence, but…”

“What stuff?” she asked, her voice sounding almost robotic. It was a lot to take in right now. Was what Qrow holding really Ruby’s cloak? _Her_ Ruby’s? Or was it just mere coincidence—

_Coincidence. All coincidences. It has to be. It has to be!_

Qrow fished something out of his pocket. “I found these next to the cloak. Tiny must’ve been holding onto them, but let ‘em go when she slept, maybe.”

An apple-shaped pendant—

**_It’s my mother’s pendant, so for the last time, Ruby, I’m not lending it to you to trace an apple!_ **

—and a long black ribbon—

**_I’m still not comfortable without them. Just give me time, Yang, please._ **

—rested on his hand. They reminded her of mementos Huntsman gather to give back to the fallens’ family.

“Recognize these, Yang?”

She didn’t answer, couldn’t. Her throat tightened up, implications swam furiously inside her head, and it took a great amount of control to keep tears from falling out. She didn’t want to cry, didn’t want to admit, even to herself, that the fate of her teammates were not as fortunate as hers had been. She never wanted to admit that Ruby…

_Oh God, Ruby…!_

“Hey! Yang, wait!”

She bolted up the stairs and into her room, slamming the door shut, locking it, and then pressing her back against it. Her breath labored, her eyes staring at the guest room ceiling, she felt something roll down her cheeks.

“Goddamit,” she said, sniffing, “here I thought I wasn’t gonna cry…”

When she tried to rubbed her eyes, she finally realized she had taken Ruby’s torn cloak with her. The scent was faded and mixed together with grass, mud, and the general unpleasantness of the Valean wilderness, but it was the strawberry-scented shampoo her sister would always use. Or maybe it was just her imagination, a memento to sense and savor, a memento that wasn’t red like roses and blood, a memento that wouldn’t conjure up images of a girl she saw grow up be torn apart by monsters of darkness.

And as the first pounding of Dad’s fists on her door vibrated onto her back, Yang cried her sorrow into her sister’s cloak.


	7. Motive

/ — — **CHAPTER 7** — — \

**Motive**

**-o- -o- -o- -o- (   I   ) -o- -o- -o- -o-**

_I guess this is what we trained for._

Inside a train cart. Weiss and Blake at her flanks.

_You two go on ahead._

Brown and pink hair. Eyes of shifting colors. A weaponized parasol.

_This one’s mine._

Redirection. Pain. Anger. Being toyed with.

Then—

**_There is nothing new under the sun._ **

Yang woke with a jolt, swimming in a sea of darkness. It smothered her face, constricted her arms, but her legs were free to kick and flop like fishes out of water. Seconds of confusion, still crossing the boundary between dream and reality, and another three making sense of the blackness that encompassed her vision. Her legs stopped flopping and she used her arm to disentangle herself from the cloak that had been wrapped around her.

Though free from the cloak’s grasp, darkness still greeted her like an old friend. Light shimmered from the window, dim but seeable, but it defined the night sky better than the room the moonlight tried to cross. Darkness, old friend and sleeping buddy, was all around her. Regardless, Yang used the limited lighting to pinpoint her location, though recalling the last moments before she slept would be enough to realize she was standing right at the entrance of her own bedroom. And it would also be enough to make her remember _why_ she was like this, wrapped in a cloak and sleeping in the dark with sweat clinging to her skin as if she had taken a trip to a sauna.

She grasped the cloak tighter, murmuring her sister’s name. She searched for the faint scent of shampoo, but all her nose identified was Valean wilderness, and why was she feeling so surprised about its utter disappearance? The strawberry shampoo was make-believe, her imagination grasping at something for comfort, running amok because the illusion was a better place than reality. Nevertheless, she buried her face in the cloak, damping it with sweat and the fresh tears that hadn’t made it to her first cry out.

It hurt to be free from the delusion. It hurt to know she somehow failed her only sister.

She didn’t ask questions, didn’t wonder why or how, didn’t think of possibilities that could disprove her sister’s apparent death, at least not right now. Grief and self-loathing squeezed the joy out of her heart, numbed the critical-thinking in her brain, sent her tumbling into a cycle of hatred and depression. She felt like she had hit the bottom of a well and the climb back out seemed too tiring and tedious for her to even try.

And anyway, why bother? Why bother at all?

Yang stood up on wobbly knees and dragged her feet towards where she knew her bed would be. Her knees hit softness while her shins hit hardness. There was her bed. She let herself fall onto the mattress with a bounce, feeling the sweat smear across skin and fabric at every brief contact. Her grip on the cloak—her only memento of the Ruby she knew and loved—was tight and unwilling to let go. She snuggled it as she willed her mind back to sleep.

Dreams were the closest thing to illusions, although she doubted it’d be all solace and fun, because nightmares were dreams as well. She feared seeing **_RED_ **.

Red like those Beowolf eyes.

Red like the eyes in the mirror.

Red like blood.

Red like roses.

**_… the emptiness and sadness that has come to take the place of you._ **

She shifted her position on the bed till she was looking at the ceiling, shrouded as it was in shadows. Sleep avoided her like it avoided insomniacs, and Yang was now uncertain if this was a good or bad thing. She wanted to escape reality, wanted her troubles to sink straight down into a dark abyss inside her brain that they’ll never come back out, and though sleep was the closest thing to making this wish happen (if by _removing_ she meant _delaying_ , because such troubles in her life were inevitable, unchangeable, this she knew, but even _that_ fact she wanted removed even for a little while), the nightmares that lurked inside her subconscious made her want to stay awake at all costs.

There was a small voice inside her making her stay in reality, telling her that to pull back now was akin to—

**_Don’t back down, Yang! The Yang Xiao Long I know has never once thought about—_ **

—giving up, to being weak, to reverting to that reckless, irresponsible little kid who thought more about a mother who was never there for her and less about her and her sister’s safety.

And the voice seemed like a punchline as well, because it sounded so much like Ruby. So much like what Ruby would’ve said whenever she or their teammates were down in the dumps, either because of a mistake in a quiz or a news report that enforces the White Fang’s genocidal crusade or a lead that came to a dead end… and various broken bones inflicted upon mooks who were too stupid to listen to their self-preservation and back the fuck out from the fight.

Looking back on that particular wild goose chase, the mooks knew what they were getting into and _still_ decided to face her head-on. They had bravery in spades compared to the girl who beat their asses in two minutes. They were ready to risk life and limb for their boss, while here she lay, trying her best to avert from her problems rather than face them.

“How fucked up is that,” she murmured to the ceiling, smiling while biting her lower lip, closing her eyes as fresh tears flowed down. She sniffed. Thoughts of Ruby resurfaced. “Fuck, fuck, _fuck!_ ”

She was a mess. No sense denying that. The cloak, the necklace, the ribbon… they didn’t cause this turmoil within her. They merely broke away the facade she’d been meticulously building since she woke up on that hospital bed minus an arm. Her calm had been fixed together tight with the thought of finding her team, so that they could figure out how they traveled into the past and somehow find a way back to their own time. Well, now she found her team, all right.

Or at least what was left of them.

It was an avenue of thought she hadn’t bothered going through. And with sleep being stubborn with its abhorrence of her, she had nothing _but_ time to ponder about the one thing she should’ve been trying to puzzle over.

How did Raven get ahold of these items? And in that, _why_ did she send them to her? What sort of message was she conveying with this, “abandon hope, your friends are dead” or “stop looking, they are gone”?

_SSDD. Same shit, different delivery_ , as Uncle Qrow would say.

Yang sat up, face frowning.

_Qrow would know_ , she thought, now sliding her feet from the mattress to the floor and standing up. _Or at least have an idea._

Raven wouldn’t have come here without a damn good reason. Her inner child gushed that she came back because of her, but that part of her was small and on the verge of going mute. She let that part of her have its round of crackpot theories before rationality took the helm. Raven had an objective in Patch. That much was certain.

Yang could say she had a few ideas on what it’d be, but she doubted any of them would come close to the mark. The best one to answer her questions was Qrow. He did, after all, reunite with her in the Usher House while she was busy dealing with the Alpha Beowolf.

With a goal in mind, she headed for the door. Her hand still clung to the cloak, and knowing that it’d be inconvenient to keep this up, she swung one end over her shoulder where it fell on the other, turning the cloak into a scarf. It covered her mouth and slapped her nose with the scent of Valean wilderness again. It wasn’t perfect and there was a thousand ways she could do to make it look better on her, but that wasn’t the point of it all. Besides, she wasn’t in a fashionista mood.

She unlocked the door, opened it, and stepped out to the still-lit hallway. Only one foot made it out of the threshold when she paused her stride, eyes instantly glancing down and to her right. A plateful of sandwiches rested on the floor, the ones Qrow made before the conversation leaped into volatile territory. At the sight of it, her stomach went wild, growling and grumbling like an emaciated beast.

A whole day without food was taking its toll, especially after the rigorous morning she had. She gulped, licked her lips, and tried not to look _too_ desperate for nourishment.

She scanned the hallway, somewhat hoping for a father or an uncle slumped down on the other side of her door, dozed off from all the waiting he did, but it was as deserted as her stomach.  Her gaze returned to the sandwiches immediately while she tried to form a picture of events that led to this.

_Whether it was Qrow or Dad or both_ , she thought as she sat down to pick up the plate, _the gesture’s appreciated. I should thank them later._

She might’ve also expected a note, written in Dad’s chicken scribble handwriting, lying somewhere atop the mountain of sandwiches, but she saw no paper amongst the bread. She got a laugh, though, when upon closer inspection of the food, the sandwich filling consisted mainly of chicken.

It lifted her spirits a bit. Just a tiny bit.

Her stomach sent several jabs at itself, reminding Yang of a burning need to eat. The thought of doing so in her still dark room (why she had yet to bother to flip the lightswitch eluded her) was rejected. The breads were toasted to a tan-like brown, which doubled, if not tripled, the amount of crumbs that could drop from every bite. There wasn’t a table in her room that had the right height for either standing or sitting while she ate, and although half of her couldn’t care less about cleanliness as long as she ingested the food sooner, the other half refused to add more work to an eventual cleanup.

Breadcrumbs plus sweaty cleavage equals _No, Thank You_ , capitals deliberate. Even when she had plans to shower after she devoured the plate and got ahold of Qrow.

She picked up the plate and headed downstairs. Halfway down, she gazed towards the end of the second floor hallway, where Dad’s and the sibling’s bedrooms were. She suddenly got this urge to check up on her younger self and little Ruby, but then her continued trek downwards cut out the view of the hallway, and the urge disintegrated like smoke. When she reached the bottom landing, more than a little eager to set the plate down on the kitchen table and begin her gluttonous attack, she heard the front door open.

Uncle Qrow tripped his way into the foyer. He corrected himself before his face met wood and closed the door with his foot. He wobbled in place, one hand clutching a paperbag in the middle while the other rested on the wall. He faced the floor, breathing more audible than usual, but Yang could still see a dark spot at the center of his left cheek.

She’d seen enough disagreements between the two men in her life to know how that came about. Aura protected Huntsmen from devastating blows, but Dad always had a certain knack for creating “lasting impressions” on Qrow whenever he went and did something stupid.

Looking back on what had transpired some hours ago, she supposed she should be more surprised that weren’t _more_ bruises on her uncle.

With a grunt, he dragged his feet on the wooden floor— _creak_ went the old floorboard—guiding and supporting himself with the wall. Two steps away from her, he stopped, eyes on the sandwiches before panning up towards her face. He looked more haggard than ever, more beat up than she first thought. The swelling on his cheek was minimal, but there were traces of red, which could only be dried up blood, inside his left nostril.

His eyes, bloodshot and harrowed, went back to the sandwiches and then back to her face. “Got enough for two?”

One of her eyebrows instinctively went up. She wanted to say no—her stomach might’ve been demanding vehemently for that—but a look at the paperbag had her pondering something.

_Eh, what the hell._

“So long as you have enough liquor there for the both of us,” she replied.

_Lord knows I need it now more than ever._

* * *

 

**-o- -o- -o- -o- (   II   ) -o- -o- -o- -o-**

“The kids are in bed,” Qrow said, and then chugged his glass to the last drop. “Tai also went about an hour later, too tired from all that’s happened and whatnot. Me”—he snorted, gestured to the empty glass and the not yet so empty bottle of brandy set on the kitchen table—”well, you know me.”

Yang rolled her eyes, munching on her chicken sandwich while pushing her empty glass towards her uncle. Qrow picked up the brandy and poured it into both of their glasses.

“Chicken and brandy don’t mix,” he said.

She swallowed before speaking. “That didn’t stop you.”

He snorted, shrugged. “I was hungry, I needed to eat. Didn’t want to bother with making something else.”

Yang grunted a reply and dove back into her half-eaten sandwich. She was torn between the priorities of her stomach and the priorities of her heart, both hungry for very different reasons. Her stomach was getting the satisfaction it yearned for, piece by piece, but her heart remained a barren, painful place for memories and questions to rot. She was bound to give into them sooner or later, and looking towards her uncle on the other side of the round table, she was certain he knew what was to come once plate and bottle were wiped clean.

He didn’t even try to stall.

“Qrow,” she said after wiping her mouth free of crumbs, “be level with me. What is it you aren’t telling me?”

He raised a brow.

“My teammates’ possessions,” she clarified, keeping her calm in check, desperately clinging to a sense of rationale while rage and unbidden curiosity struggled to find the answers quicker than the current pace. “How did my mother get her hands on them?”

He shrugged, gaze to the kitchen window.

Rage took control and she bashed the table. Glasses, bottle, and plate blasted off and up before coming crashing down, as if gravity had momentarily forgotten them. The plate and glasses landed with grace, wobbling on their circular bottom edges before settling. The whiskey bottle, however, landed with none, whole body slumping on wood as its alcohol, already halfway consumed, vomited from its mouth as if imitating its victims who had overindulged. Qrow returned the bottle in an upright position with deliberate slowness and ignored the spill that slid off the table and onto the floor.

He stared into her eyes, unblinking, dark blood against raging crimson.

The joints in Yang’s knuckles popped. Her fist shook where she hit the table, splinters jutting out around it like the quills of an agitated porcupine.

She closed her eyes—the first to begrudgingly look away—took deep breaths, and counted to ten. Then she continued towards twenty, just to be sure. Afterwards, she thought of Dad, she thought of little Ruby, little Yang, all three sleeping soundly upstairs and how much noise she’d have to make to have them wake up worried and confused.

Her clenched hand relaxed and her eyes opened up—now back to lilac—to look towards her uncle again.

He remained relaxed and nonchalant, using the twenty seconds of silence and calming breaths to drink till the bottle ran dry. Unlike before, however, his gaze wandered, staring at the liquor puddle below him, staring at the refrigerator at her right flank, staring out the window to her left. Every time, though, his gaze returned to his hands resting on the table, watching them clench and unclench, over and over.

The rest of Yang’s anger dissipated.

Qrow was as much of a mess as she was tonight, and it was in no small part of what had happened today: the visit to the Usher House _and_ her doppelganger’s run-in with Mother of the Year (a pang of regret from the name-calling, but it was short-lived). This was just her own speculation, but she thought her uncle was still coming to grips with today, how a simple trip to the woods could lead to so much pain and worry. He probably _expected_ discomfort, but never would he prepare for something of this magnitude in heartache.

Chasing the bottom of a glass had always been Qrow’s definition of a safe retreat, and he was going for the bottom like a Vacuan in desperate need of water.

She looked away from him, decided to gaze out the window like him. Dark, heavy clouds canopied most of the sky. A diagonal tear opened in the middle of that giant canopy, bringing into a view the bright shards of Remnant’s moon and the sparkling stars scattered about it that on some nights it’d be difficult to tell the bright dots apart, whether they were the last spark of a dead star or a piece of Remnant’s shattered satellite.

_Since when have I become this pessimistic?_

“Ray,” Qrow whispered before going silent again, eyes on the table where his arms were crossed and resting. In the dead silence between them, he might as well have screamed that word at her, the nickname he’d sometimes revert to whenever they had a discussion about the dysfunctional member of the Branwen family, although Yang would be lying if she didn’t at least half-believe that essentially every single person who was Branwen by blood was dysfunctional in their own way. She could’ve pushed him to continue, but she held back, somehow knowing that Qrow would say what needed to be said in his own time.

“Raven,” he tried again, his voice now louder but still whispery, “doesn’t… look at the world the way the rest of us do. She and I had our Auras unlocked on our fifth birthday. My Semblance manifested fully five years later. Ray, in a month.” He closed his eyes, scrunching them tight like a man blinded by a bright light. When he opened them again, he sighed as if he were letting out something monumental.

_For him_ , she thought, _maybe it is._ _Still… five years old. Like—_

“Like you,” he continued, but then shook his head. “I mean the you upstairs, in bed. Aura unlocked at just five years old.”

She bit her lip, feeling the weight of that sentence. It didn’t add up. “But I unlocked mine at ten.”

“As it should’ve been, in my opinion.” He scoffed. “But reality never gives a shit about opinions.”

“But why, though?” _Why aren’t the past and my present coinciding? And…_ “Why would she do that?”

“Tai asked me the same. Told him I honestly don’t know. Ray hasn’t always been healthy up here.” He tapped his skull twice. “One of… the many side effects she received from unlocking her Semblance.”

So Mother of the Year was a lot crazier than Yang gave credit for. She had moments during her many searches in the past that Raven was off her rocker, moments where she gave up trying to rationalize the reason (or reasons) for her sudden departure, but such thoughts come and go like lightning, like an idea that quickly overstayed its welcome in her head.

Such thoughts returned with both vengeance and reinforcement, and it’d take a while for Yang to get used to having them actually linger around rather than get kicked out the moment they stepped inside her mind.

“She’d,” Qrow said, pausing to shake his head and sigh through his nose, “she’d get visions sometimes. Of places all over. Vale proper. Shade in Vacuo. Yolanda in Mistral. The outback in Menagerie. Somewhere in Vytal, in Solitas.” He snorted. “There, she said the snowstorm blew into her eye.”

Usually with such remembrance, the humor would linger for a while, lifting the corners of the recaller’s lips as sweet nostalgia ran its course, but not with Qrow. As soon as he finished that last sentence, the still-forming smile dropped like a scaffold that lost its foundation. He eyed his drink, lifting the glass up to chin level, watched the alcohol swirl about the edges of the glass’s rim. He chugged it down quickly, eyes closed, and let out a long sigh.

“What exactly is her Semblance?” Yang asked, grabbing her own drink and mimicking her uncle.

Qrow shrugged, scoffed, shook his head. “I never got a direct answer from her.” He grabbed the bottle and poured himself a glass, but it offered no more than a drop. He glared at the bottle as if he wanted to slam it on the floor, glass shards flying be damned. Yang tried to stop him, concerned that drunkenness eroded enough of his inhibitions to not care that he might wake up everyone in the house, but fortunately, irrational bursts of emotion were in short supply inside her uncle’s heart. He placed the bottle back—though not too gently—on the table.

“ _No one_ got a direct answer,” he continued. “She prefers demonstrations over words, even though it would take just one to sum it all up: Portals.”

Silence, Yang pondering, Qrow collecting his thoughts, which were most likely torn between wanting to explain and wishing to kill sobriety entirely.

Yang eyed her glass, somewhat wishing there was more whiskey for her to drown herself in, before pulling her hand back to her side, empty. The alcohol she consumed rolled around  inside her stomach, and she could practically feel the warmth it exhumed in there as if there had been a bright, hot metal rod dousing after a trip from the forge. She liked the feeling; it combated the cold that was keen on slithering into her system as the discussion entered, Yang guessed, more sensitive grounds. She licked her lips before saying, “Teleportation?”

“Rare trait, right?” Qrow said in lieu of a direct affirmative.

_You sound like your sister_ , Yang wanted to say but she shut her mouth in time.

“Quite bullshit of a power, too,” he continued, pausing to take a deep breath and give a desperate-looking expression to the ceiling. “But it’s limited to the size of the portal she summons. No portal, no shitting on physics. These things can be as big as a person and as small as her eye.”

“Small…” She blinked, connecting the dots quickly. “Her visions?”

“Portal opening up in front of her eye.” His forefinger hovered next to the space half an inch before his right eye. “She’s been incredibly lucky as a kid. Cold wind and snow hitting her eye aside, it would’ve been just likely to have been magma, fire, sandstorm, seawater, the barrel of a gun, the point of a blade.” He shook his head. “And it took her about a year to get those portals under control. I can’t say with certainty that she saw things she wasn’t supposed to see… but I also can’t say with certainty that she _didn’t_ either. She wasn’t talking, and I never really gave it much thought until after Beacon.

“She and Tai were a thing by then, and it only took a while before they got you.”

Yang turned her gaze to the table, to the dent she made on it, and swallowed her own spit. Her hand, now resting idly on her lap, began to crack the knuckles with her thumb.

“I know this already, Qrow,” she said.

“Do you?”

She bit her lip, continued staring at the cracks on the table. “... yes.”

“If you do, you would’ve already had an answer to your question.”

She heard knuckles popping, the sound coming from across her rather than below.

“Ray prefers actions over words,” Qrow said, “even when, in the end, it leads to miscommunication. Tai and Summer got used to it”—he snorted, smirked—”after a _lot_ of trial and error.”

“Just where exactly are you going with this?”

Qrow looked at her, sighing through his nose, and slowly smiled. There was something about the smile that made her both confused and uneasy, kind of like one of those optical illusions where on one perspective she’d see a young lady looking away, and on another she’d see the side profile of an old woman.

“Long story short,” he said at last, finally letting go of that enigmatic smile, “I believe Ray has more to do with this than any of us realize. I had plenty of time to think on it.”

She furrowed her eyebrows, sat straight in her seat. “She’s…”

“We’re dealing with one heck of a time-fuck here, Yang. The things I saw in the Old Place don’t just occur naturally. More so when we factor in you”—he pointed his forefinger at her—”Ray’s knowledge of you”—he shifted the finger to point at the ceiling with the newly risen middle finger—”and the discrepancies between your time and this one.” His thumb went up. Then his gaze, somehow, turned more intensely at her, like a critic actively searching for faults in an art piece. “You’re an outright impossibility, more so now than ever. No offense.”

Yang swallowed a lump in her throat, neither denying nor agreeing what he accused her of being. There was truth in his words—she was most definitely an anomaly if one were to look at her and the things involving her—but then again, she hadn’t given this much thought than the rudimentary ‘Am I remembering things right?’ whenever major discrepancies occur between _her_ past and _this_ past. Case in point: Young Yang having her Aura unlocked five years earlier than Yang remembered, and she remembered that day in school too clearly to consider it as some implanted memory or something.

Right?

“What does it all mean?”

“Hell if I know,” Qrow replied, “or rather I don’t have the whole picture here. But most likely Ray does.”

She blinked, and inside her mind puzzle pieces clicked in place. “And she’s not talking.”

Qrow nodded, lips tightly pressed against each other, eyes boring straight at her own.

“She wants me,” she continued, pausing for a moment, “wants _us_ … to figure it out for ourselves.” She shut her eyes and shook her head. Her hand moved towards her nape to scratch an itch, while her immaterial hand shifted repeatedly between clenched and unclenched. When she opened her eyes again, her gaze was on the table, on the splintered dent she made. Why did it feel like that was a lifetime ago?

“How?” she asked.

“She already left us clues.”

A moment to process that. Then:

“You mean she gave us a clue and you’re just saying this _now_?!”

Qrow sighed. “ _You_ found those clues, Yang.”

“... huh?”

Her hand clenched.

Both of them.

She already knew what he was about to say, but a part of her was desperately wishing she was wrong about it.

“The torn red cloak, the silver apple, the black ribbon. Your team’s possessions.”

She took a deep breath and stuttered it out.

“Ray knows something, knows what happened to them, but she hadn’t said anything outright to either me or you. She left these things because she _wanted_ you to know. _Needed_ you to know. To have some of your questions answered and at the same time, ensure any new questions can only be answered by her.”

Qrow stood up, walked over to her, and when he put a hand on her shoulder was also when she realized how badly she was shaking.

“I know my sister, and if she hasn’t changed much over the years, then this is her roundabout way of saying, ‘Come find me.’”

* * *

 

**-o- -o- -o- -o- (   III   ) -o- -o- -o- -o-**

This had to be a joke.

“Does it look like I’m joking, Yang?”

She blinked at him.

“No, you didn’t say that out loud,” he said, on the verge of rolling his eyes but reeled it in, last second. “You’re more of an open book than you realize.”

Glaring, she knew, would be ineffective, but she did so anyway. Her anger had a louder, more influential voice than her rationale, oftentimes snuffing out the latter altogether in a barrage of shouts and shotgun blasts that’d deafen a civilian’s ears within seconds. Even so, Qrow had grown used to her short fuse, able to either ignore it outright or douse it away within moments if the mood fancied him to do so. He’d always been the impenetrable wall in her life apart from Dad, someone whom she always failed to push back whenever red shrouded her eyes (both literally and metaphorically), so to see him take a step back and remove his hand on her shoulder, as if fearing he’ll catch fire, it confused her. And unnerved her as well. As if he was unused to her tangible but relatively tame outbursts.

_Of course he isn’t used to you_ , she thought. _The niece he knows and loves is a five-year-old sleeping upstairs, not a one-armed teen with anger management issues._

Qrow shook his head, eyes closed, before opening them again to look directly into her own. She detected some trepidation in his gaze and could only guess at the cause. Frustration still blazed within her despite the frantic pleading of her caged rationale to settle down. It mingled with worry, danced around with sadness, and rubbed elbows with confusion. None at least were consuming her entirely, but they were close. Very close, indeed.

“Sorry,” Qrow said. “Did I hit a sore spot?”

The way it sounded seemed like sarcasm, but Yang knew her uncle enough to spot the difference between when he was sarcastic and when he was not. As much of a ladies man he was, he was terrible with women whose emotions gravitated towards the negative spectrum. Anger and sadness, most especially. She’d seen some of his flubs firsthand, too. That unnerving feeling got stronger now.

“No,” she said, standing up. She needed to clear her head for a bit or at least not think about the Goliath in the room.

**_Come find me._ **

She bit her lip, gaze wandering about to find a reasonable distraction, and she honed in on the alcohol puddle on the kitchen floor. She stood up and walked towards the sink. The dish rag there was wet, but it would do.

“No,” she said again, focusing still on the dish rag in her hand, both of which hovered above the sink, the latter squeezing the moisture out of the former. Yang felt driplets of water cascade to her wrist and drop soundlessly onto the metal surface. A blink later, she realized her grip on the rag was tight enough to make her fist shake and her knuckles bloodlessly white. “It’s nothing like that.”

**_There is nothing new under the sun._ **

She relaxed her hand and made her way to the alcohol puddle, feeling Qrow’s gaze tracking her. When she got close, her uncle stood up determinedly, and she knew it would be about her agitated thoughts on Raven’s message, the chaotic and incessant battering on her convictions like the pendulum of a grandfather clock that’d never stop ticking.

Contrary to her expectations, Qrow gestured for the rag, muttering, “I’ll clean it up.” Yang wouldn’t, not just because it was a mess she made to begin with, but also because Qrow and drunkenness had at last come together in perfect harmony. His gait faltered in every step, and he’d be hardpressed to blame a leg injury when it was clear as crystal that he lacked balance even when staying still, swaying to and fro without his knowledge.

“I got it,” Yang rebuked. She had always known her uncle to be a very coherent drunk, able to dash and dot his verbal **t** ’s and **i** ’s while the rest of his body suffered the inebriation like normal. Judgment, though, was still iffy, mostly because of how inconsistent it could be. Sometimes coherent, sometimes the opposite.

Sometimes utterly dangerous.

Yang knelt beside the table and cleaned up the spill. She went back to the sink to wring the rag dry again. An encore performance was needed.

Qrow had yet to say another word. Nothing about the source of her earlier anger, nothing about her thoughts on Raven’s cat-and-mouse game, just sudden indifference. Yang, unsure if this was what she wanted, tried her best to ignore the gnawing his stare was doing to her spine. It was Signal all over again, when the bond between and niece and uncle was banned from his class, and scrutiny was never in short supply. Qrow was excellent at what he does, be it being the uncle who was there when daddy dearest shut down or a teacher who’d rather be hated than loved for letting his students slack off.

Here, she wondered what he was looking for. Instead of faults in her fighting stance, maybe he was checking for faults in her words, signs on her face, or evidence in her actions? Whichever it was, his gaze was difficult to ignore.

_You’d think I’d be used to it by now._

But no…

His gaze was just that intense, no matter how high your resistance to it.

Halfway into squeezing out all the alcohol from the rag, it was swiftly taken away a moment after she relaxed her grip. Qrow held the rag with both hands and wrung it over the sink. One attempt had more results than the four or five times she squeezed the damn thing.

“Qrow,” she said, almost a growl. Her eyes narrowed at his nonchalant face.

He snorted, eyes on the rag. He returned her glare with a lopsided smile—no more than half an inch of mouth upturning, but it was a smile, regardless. “Thought you could use a hand,” he said, and then tossed the rag to her.

Yang caught it and sighed. It was meant to be a sign of her annoyance, but with it halfway morphed into a snort accompanied by a smile she could barely keep down, her eagle-eyed uncle (or rather crow-eyed uncle, haha, badum tss) would’ve noticed even if he were looking away.

“You,” she said, “are the worst. The absolute worst.”

He nodded, leaning his bum beside the counter. “If you say so.”

They reverted to silence. Yang finished cleaning and, standing back up, threw the rag towards the sink. Qrow was still next to it, leaning back with his arms crossed, and if the rag was kind of aimed straight at his head, then it was no more than mere coincidence. He dodged it, of course, and he eyed her with a face that exhumed both unamusement and resignation.

Rolling her eyes, Yang rotated her chair till it faced Qrow and sat down. She pressed against the backseat, and she was surprised to feel damp coldness prod at her back. For a moment, she thought the rag she threw had stalked out of the sink and hopped onto her chair, waiting for her to sit, like a B-horror movie monster, but the next moment had her realizing that it was just sweat.

She let none of this be expressed on her face. At the time she sat down, her eyes met his unblinkingly, as her phantom limb continued clenching and unclenching with little care of the damage being done to her phantom palm. She could even feel the ectoplasmic blood leaking and dripping on the floor, and she resisted the urge to clean _that_ mess up too.

_Let the ghost custodian handle it_. She let out a small smile at the thought. Nothing more.

Apart from that, blood meant an injury and an injury meant, more often than not, pain, and the phantom pain was there, all right, constant in its buzzing around the nerves of her stump that she was dreading it would be her companion forevermore. The floor was clean and her right arm was absent of any more injuries (the stump had healed quite nicely, too), and even she herself knew and understood that this was all in her head, as if her body were still running on pre-programmed commands before the amputation, a glitch that never got around to getting patched over. It’d be nice if it was gone, but the phantom pain was as powerful and real as any other wound she endured through the years… except this particular one was deep. Deep enough to make her suffer months after it had healed.

_It’s all in your head_ , Doctor Tushar had said to her while she was still in the hospital. _It’s all in your head._

It was all in her head.

It was all in her head.

It was all in her _fucking_ head.

More than anything, she wished this whole day was all in her head, too. Just another long nightmare that plagued her in her sleep sometimes.

“What are you going to do, Yang?”

The question surprised her, although it shouldn’t have. She slumped back onto her chair, the impact strong enough to make the chair groan and slide an inch backwards.

“Yang?”

She wanted to shut everything out, wanted to stop thinking, stop worrying, wanted to sleep and wake up back in her dorm room with Weiss, Blake, and Ruby frantically getting ready for another day at Beacon. Was that really just a few months ago? It felt like years, maybe decades.

“Yang.”

She blinked, then sighed. “I don’t know.”

Qrow’s feet shifted in place, but his mouth no longer uttered her name. He leaned back on the kitchen counter, arms crossing ( _both_ arms, her inner self sneered), and kept up his newfound silence, letting his eyes do the talking instead. She knew he was waiting for an elaboration, but like his odd reaction to her anger, trying to explain her reasons might result in the same thing. Not caution and trepidation—not entirely that, anyway; nothing that specific. She expected—

_(and feared)_

—an odd reaction. Because even after weeks of this, Yang would still oftentimes project her memories towards these versions of her dad and uncle. Ruby here was still a toddler, and not even the most talkative sort (although that’ll change after another year or two, she knew) and projecting a teen with a baby was far more difficult than projecting an adult with a young adult. Yang couldn’t really help it, talking to the men in her life as if she hadn’t been displaced in time like that Ocean fairytale in reverse, but now it seemed daunting to do so, especially about a topic she had trouble opening up to with Dad and Qrow in her own timeline. It was never brought up, not even after she demolished Junior’s bar, but they more than likely suspected her motives, maybe understood them.

The Qrow in front of her would not.

Or at least… she was afraid he wouldn’t. It wouldn’t be the same either, but was she certain of that? Did it matter?

Qrow grunted, tilting his head a little to his right. “I hope you aren’t considering setting off on a dangerous mission to find my riddle-loving sister.”

She tried not to wince.

“Are you, Yang?” He knew she was lying. Her decision had already been made, whether or not she realized at the time, but apart from what Qrow (or Dad) would react to it, she was also afraid of the road she’d be walking… or if there would even _be_ a road. For all she knew, it’d be like stranded on a boat in the middle of the ocean, absent of land, absent of signs, absent of direction, just forced to drift with the waves and hoping no storm would come and capsize her boat.

“Yes,” she said finally. “I’m just… torn on what I should do.”

Her uncle raised a brow. “Uh huh. You know what to do and don’t know what to do at the same time?”

“I mean…” She stopped, closed her eyes, gritted her teeth. No one said a thing as she spent a minute to organize her thoughts, make them as coherent as possible. Then: “Do you know why I went to that old house in the first place?”

He needed no refresher on what particular old house she meant and his overall reaction was a soft sigh. “Yeah. Tai found the broken picture frame.”

Yang nodded, smiled sardonically, and said, “I never stopped looking, you know.” Deep breath. “I hadn’t found the answers I was looking for, but that first—and frankly stupid—trip opened my eyes to what the consequences would’ve been. So… I made a promise to myself that even though I’ll continue searching for my mother, I refuse to let it control my whole life. Ruby and I would’ve died that day if you hadn’t been there, Uncle Qrow.”

His eyes narrowed a bit, and he grunted a low “I see.”

“Now, though?” _Now the stakes are higher. It’s no longer just me and her._ Yang’s phantom hand clenched and clenched, and the pain from it was absolute and real. She doubted her head could be so deluded as to convey pain with such intensity at will. It, however, couldn’t compare to what she felt in her heart, the insurmountable weight of worry, stress, and rage chained up to it, emotional baggages that did their best to pull her down into a dark, inescapable pit.

“Ruby,” she said, “my whole team. She _knows_ something. Knows what happened to them, and instead of telling me, she’s being cryptic about it, she’s—”

She bumped her fist on her knee. There was no actual force behind it. At this point, the events of today had sapped much of the energy she recuperated from her long nap.

“It feels like she’s mocking me,” she continued with a self-derisive snort. “Me and my promise.”

Another weak bump to her knee, about as strong as baby Ruby’s playful swings whenever she got overexcited.

“I’m…“ She felt something trickle down her cheek, and she wiped it away immediately. “I just don’t know what to do.”

_Liar._

She stood up on weak legs and slowly made her way out of the kitchen.

“Where are you going?” Qrow asked, as she stopped right below the doorway, her back facing him.

Another tear rolled down. She didn’t wipe it, didn’t want Qrow to see just how emotionally weak she was.

“I’m going to bed,” she said, and was thankful her voice didn’t croak. “I wanna just sleep this off.”

She walked on before he could give out a response. It was rude, but she was just too tired to care.

Halfway up the stairs, she heard her uncle enter the hallway and call out to her. “We can talk about this when you’re ready.”

Not tomorrow, not the moment she wakes up.

**_When you’re ready._ **

“I’ll always be here,” he said, and a small part of her wished his sister was the one saying those words to her, despite knowing that it was seventeen years too late for such wishful thinking. “I just want you to know that.”

She did know. He had said the same words to her about two years ago. It was like deja vu except the tone and topic were not at all alike. How they resonated in her heart, however, remained as powerful and heartwarming as they were then.

She hastened her ascent, stormed into her room, closed the door behind her, and swiftly went to bed, where the pillow did its best to muffle her sobs.

Come morning, Young Yang still hadn’t woken up.


End file.
